


Dreams in the House That Does Not Exist

by DJClawson



Series: Child of the Cosmos [4]
Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: All kinds of abuse, Backstory, Cecil's Dad, Cecil/Harlan mentioned, Flashbacks, M/M, Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-14
Updated: 2013-11-09
Packaged: 2017-12-29 11:06:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 12
Words: 54,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1004698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DJClawson/pseuds/DJClawson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos explores the house in the Desert Creek development, and ends up delving deep into a part of Cecil's past that the whole town has forgotten. To save Night Vale, Cecil must come to terms with it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Book

**Author's Note:**

> If physical, emotional, or sexual abuse is a trigger for you, skip this one.
> 
> That last one is not described in great detail.

Chapter 1

2013

Carlos (the Scientist) never thought he would have an experience in Night Vale that he could tell no one about. Of course, before he had a lot more “never thought I would”’s on his list, but at least he could talk about them – to his colleagues, to the volunteer scientists who only qualified for the position in that they owned their own lab coats, to someone on Skype, to his recording device, and eventually to Cecil. Maybe everyone (except Cecil) wouldn’t believe them, but he could talk about it.

But that changed.

He could not remember how the night started exactly, only that Cecil was at a PTA meaning and therefore busy and Carlos went out for some drinks the newest volunteers for the scientific community. Playful ribbing about his refusal to open the door to the House That Did Not Exist was followed by downed shot after shot and next thing he knew he was sitting on the lawn that probably did not exist of the House That Did Not Exist, a half-empty bottle of bourbon in one hand and his camcorder in the other.

It was dark now and the evening chill set in. The ground beneath him was cold and it made his butt cold and he didn’t like it. “Fuck you,” he said to the house. It was the house’s fault he was out here, alone, publicly intoxicated (if that was a crime in Night Vale, and he wasn’t sure it was) and without a ride home. “What have you got that I haven’t got?”

Which was a ridiculous thing to ask a house, really. Any house. It didn’t even make sense.

No one was awoken by his shouting. The houses on either side weren’t occupied; even Night Valians knew better than to live next to a House That Did Not Exist. It lowered property values. The House That Did Not Exist had no one to take care of the overgrown scrubs in front of it. And what if it had bedbugs and it spread to the whole neighborhood? There was no one to complain to.

The bourbon burned his throat and he knew he was wasting a good bottle, too drunk to appreciate it. “I can take whatever you throw at me.”

To which the door responded with what Carlos first thought was a trick of the light off the street lamps – the shiny brass doorknob turned slowly until there was an audible ‘click’ and the door slowly opened with an elongated creak as it swung back into the house in a rather clear invitation.

A logical, reasonable man like Carlos would have done something sane then, like called for backup, or the police, or at the very least, Cecil. But he didn’t. He abandoned the bottle after a single fortifying sip and climbed the front steps, camcorder in hand.

A cold blast hit him as he stepped inside, but it was a different kind of chill than the weather outside. It seemed to go right through him, unhampered by the clothes it blew back as if someone was passing through. He checked the functions on his camcorder and saw that they were all still functioning. “Okay. This is Professor Carlos Men – the Scientist.” He didn’t know how he’d slipped into that habit, but he noted the date and time, basic atmospheric conditions, and continued to narrate as he put one foot in front of another.

“There seems to be no electricity in the house.” He flipped the light switch for good measure, and was proven correct. “Despite Dana’s assertions in her message to Cecil, there is a good deal of furniture in the house.” It almost would have looked lived in if it hadn’t all been covered in white sheeting. “Appears to be a one-family style house or a boarding house, and has not been divided up into apartments like other houses in town.” He could only see from the camera light that there were doors upstairs, but the central stairway looked too rickety and termite-eaten for his tastes. “Unable to determine in the stairs are a safety hazard.”

He reached the kitchen and ran the sink, but nothing came up. “The water’s shut off or the pipes are blocked.” He was not eager to open an unplugged refrigerator, but there was nothing inside except a box of baking soda. “Someone was very thorough in closing up this house. No signs of recent habitation.” There were remains of character, though. The fridge still had magnets on it, one holding up a now-illegible faded report card from Night Vale High School. “Residents were probably citizens, at least one teenager. Current whereabouts unknown.”

He found paintings on the walls – family members looking severe both in oil and in old daguerreotypes. “Evidence of a long family history in the house, possibly the same family.” There were several more modern wall hangings, but they were empty. “Recent photography has obviously been removed, possibly to prevent people from discovering the identifies of the last residents.”

Carlos ran a finger along the bookshelves, clearing away dust and spider webs to reveal the titles on the spine. “Fairly ordinary collection of books. All municipally approved at first glance.” Cecil had similar titles in his home. Carlos circled around the main staircase again, giving the rooms he was willing to go into another sweep. It all seemed rather ... ordinary. Spooky, but ordinary. He went to check the book case again for more interesting reads when his camcorder-cum-flashlight hit the wall and he saw the top of something he couldn’t make out. “Hello.” It seems to be the top of a door frame. A door frame behind a book case.

He had to set the camcorder down. It took both hands and most of his body weight to push the book case to the side by three feet, where he could see it more obviously fit into the décor. Someone had shoved it over to hide the door.

With considerably more tension he took a deep breath and opened it, shining the light down the wooden steps that led into some kind of basement. He tested one step, and then another. They seemed to hold relatively well under his full weight, so he proceeded slowly.

Halfway down, the visual on his camera cut to static. He couldn’t say he was surprised. As long as he still had the light, he was good to go. He paused and ran it across the entire room that he could see from his angle, which wasn’t much. There was less dust, possibly from being spared from the elements that might make their way into the house, but it was just as musty and the air was even staler. He found the idea that no one had been breathing it in a long time comforting, a clear indicator that he was alone.

It had been, at some time in the relatively recent past (maybe a decade or two before, from the décor) converted into a rec room instead of a more traditional storage location. The carpet was an ugly maroon, the walls were paneled over with wood except for locations where the paneling had broken or come down and the concrete foundation was exposed. There were much cheaper bookshelves piled with books and an uncovered, rotting sofa against one wall.

He set one foot on the ground before being hit with the smell. It made him choke, and he dropped his camera, but the light did not go out. It was not the scent of a dead body – he knew that smell well enough – but it was just as bad, nearly un-breathable, and it tickled his brain as he failed to remember what it reminded him of. Eventually he found a piece of scrap cloth for wiping down tables that made its way into his back pocket during cleaning day at the lab and covered his mouth with it, and then he could manage and let his eyes adjust to the room, half-lit as it was. The camcorder was still just playing static on the view screen, but that wasn’t where the humming was coming from. He picked it up and held it to his ear to be sure.

There was no body, either, but there were bones. Carlos had recently gained some expertise in recognizing the bones of small animals and larger mammals, There was a large collection of them stacked up in the corner, with others scattered about and crunching beneath his feet. He almost tripped and finally swung his camera’s light down to get a good inspection of the door. It was harder for a layman to tell what was just carpet stains and what was blood stains, but he wasn’t a layman in this, either. There was a lot of blood on the floor, interspersed with broken length of chain. Some still led back to the wall where they were nailed in, others looked like they had been pulled straight out of the concrete, taking the paneling with them. There were bike chains and dog chains and what looked like shackles. There were other assorted items, too – a pail, a torn shoe, scraps of clothing. Obviously, no one had bothered to clean up this part of the house before abandoning it.

The humming was becoming more persistent and more irritating. Carlos’s light finally fell over a possible source – the altar at the end of the long room. It was made of sculpted stone and higher than most altars in Night Vale, with a shelf next to it for ritual implements, which were missing except for an empty bowl. The blood stones were placed around the altar in pairs – twice the necessary amount and with alternating shapes and shades, as if they were different sets of bloodstones that were combined into one. In the center, painted in white chalk stained with red, was something that looked like a leaf at first. One long tem, two diagonal strokes –

An Elder sign.

Carlos’s body lurched back before his mind fully processed the information, kicking over the shelf and black tapestry that must have adorned the wall originally in its clumsiness. The ringing sound became louder, hiding far-off chanting, and the smell hit his nostrils with particular severity. He could not hear his own movements, or his labored breathing, or the camcorder’s various noises. He could only hear the humming and he recognized it now. He knew its source.

A mere two feet away from him was _the book_. Carlos had seen many magical or damned things in his life, having briefly been junior librarian at the main archives of Miskatonic University, and there was still only one book that earned the designation of ‘the book.’

And it was sitting right there. Laying, actually. It was open, but overturned long ago and its pages were probably warping and creasing as a result. Carlos did not linger, or check the edition, or even right it. He turned and fled the house, something he should have done hours ago or whenever he had entered, and flung himself on the cool dirty of the sandy lawn, almost trying to bury his head in the sand so he would see nothing and hear nothing except maybe the door slamming shut behind him, which he did make sure to do.

He lay there for an indeterminate amount of time. He did not want to move, or even turn over and look up at the stars, which would only be terrifying to him now. His body was clenched in raw, primal terror that there was no way to fight – not that he had the energy to do so. His breathing was as ragged as if he’d been running for a week, and his chest pounded into the ground and he played the words _back in Night Vale back in Night Vale back in Night Vale_ over and over again in his mind like a chant, because Night Vale was safe compared to where he’d just been.

Eventually his chest was raw but his heart stopped beating so hard it hurt, and he felt like might think about moving again. His phone had buzzed – probably Cecil finishing the show – and he had ignored it. He still didn’t want to answer it, but he at least acknowledged its existence. Cecil was not only real but Cecil was a comforting voice, and Carlos needed to hear a comforting voice. Just not here – so close to it all. He got to his feet, found the camcorder, and smashed it on a rock before stumbling to a main street. Most of the shops were closed, but Rico’s was open all night in case people needed a last-minute emergency slice and Carlos sat down on the sidewalk edge in front of it. “Cecil? Hey. Can you pick me up?”

He was happy that they were far enough in their relationship that Cecil didn’t have to ask him any further questions and knew where he wanted to go. The fact that he smelled of beer, smoke, and bourbon probably helped as he climbed into Cecil’s car, which was ancient and purring.

“Doing science?”

“Yes.”

Cecil was unnaturally good at reading people’s moods, something that freaked Carlos out on occasion because he felt like he could hide nothing from him, but it just gave him solace because he knew the ride would be silent and he could lean his cheek against the window and look out while trying not to see anything.

“You did have me a little worried,” Cecil admitted when they were back at the house, and Carlos was so tired he was tossing his clothing around the room instead of properly depositing it somewhere. “You usually answer if you’re not in the lab, and I knew you weren’t in the lab. Are you okay?”

He didn’t feel like lying to Cecil, so he paused and thought very carefully about his answer. “I just need to get some sleep.”

Cecil kissed him on the cheek (could he smell that awful smell? Was there residue from that haunted basement?) and helped him into bed. Carlos didn’t know why he expected to fall asleep with so much tension in the core of his body, but he succeeded in at least nodding off before the nightmares arrived.

There were so many of them, and so unspecified. He hadn’t read the book, so he didn’t know why anything was manifesting. It had to all be from his imagination, and Night Vale had given him plenty of nightmare fuel. He woke in brief starts, clamoring for air. Cecil still seemed to be asleep, for which he was grateful, though Carlos must have stolen all the sheets by halfway through the night by tossing and turning until he was in a little, sweaty cocoon, and once he awoke to them all peacefully straightened out and Cecil’s arm over his chest, gently tugging him closer. Carlos didn’t want to be that close if he was going to be so active in his sleep, but it was nice to feel Cecil’s hand against his skin.

He overslept but felt like he hadn’t slept at all, and was nursing more of a fear hangover than the actual hangover he should have been nursing. Cecil was making eggs. “How do you feel?”

“Still tired.” Carlos yawned. He felt Cecil deserved something for his patience. “An experiment went badly. I don’t want to talk about.”

“Okay,” Cecil replied in that very understanding and very soothing tone of his, and Carlos decided he had the best boyfriend ever.

            ****************************************

The next night was little better, but over the week the nightmares decreased, and Carlos could stay awake during the day and concentrate on work again, which he threw himself into after locating the most mundane project he could find, which was tracking mesquite tree pollination cycles. He was aware that the Sheriff’s Secret Police were making an extra effort to follow him, with two bushes outside his lab instead of one, and an occasionally cough or snort on his phone line, but they otherwise kept their distance. It was probably because he didn’t tell anyone what had happened through any means of communication. He didn’t text about it, write about it, talk about it, Skype about it, leave voicemails about it, or Google more information on the subject. The only person he would really even contemplate emailing was Professor Henry Armitage (the Third) at Miskatonic, but he was still unsure if that was even a good idea. He wasn’t sure how to Professor would feel compelled to react to a new copy of the Necronomicon being discovered in the Southwest, of unknown origin and edition. He would probably ask Carlos to go back for more information. He certainly wouldn’t want him to sit on it, unless sitting on it meant pouring a ton of concrete into the foundation of the building, waiting for it dry, and then sitting on that.

Carlos didn’t succeed in putting it out of his mind, but he could make room for other things – until Sunday, when he had dinner with someone who was the last person on earth who should be told about Carlos’s discovery.

Sunday nights were now family dinners with Isaac, usually in Cecil’s apartment because Cecil was a town celebrity (as was Carlos) and Isaac didn’t like crowds. Carlos got along with Isaac, but they also didn’t talk a whole lot, and Carlos mainly found out what he was up to either from the dinners themselves or from Cecil. While Isaac seemed to be settling into Night Vale, he was a rough character to get along with even at his most polite, and seemed less at ease with Carlos than Carlos with Isaac, if that was possible. Unlike the rest of the town, who were under Cecil’s spell, Carlos still found Isaac’s appearance unsettling, even if it was now only in a way he couldn’t describe (or if Isaac was clearly making use out of the eye at the end of his tail. Which was creepy.)

Mostly out of habit, Isaac did try to pass as human most of the time, which meant keeping his tentacles retracted back into his hump and not letting his tail just whip around. He had given up wearing shoes, and where his pants ended you could clearly see the fur and hooves, one of them normal and the other smaller and twisted and usually hanging limp, the very tip of it maybe resting on the floor. While Carlos was staring at his gluten-free noodles and trying not to think about the Necronomicon, a book Isaac had broken into the Kremlin to try to steal, Cecil and Isaac were discussing Isaac’s visit to the reconstructive surgeon.

“He says he think he can do it, but it would be a major operation,” Isaac said, stabbing at his plate with unnecessary force. Carlos winced but Cecil did not. “The bone is all twisted so he would have to reshape it and hope the muscles build up around it. And there would be a lot of metal pins. If it even worked that’s still a lot of metal going into me.” It was still less metal than his crutches, but he was clearly unnerved by the concept. “I would be a robot.”

“Cyborg,” Carlos corrected.

“As long as you’re not in any pain as you are,” Cecil said, showing great concern, “then you don’t have to change anything about yourself. Oh, and how did that job go?”

“Pretty well, actually.” Isaac smiled mischievously. So, evilly. “If another job comes along, I’m sure they’ll hire me back.”

Isaac had some kind of contract work that was very sporadic. Cecil wouldn’t say anything about because, he told Carlos, he didn’t officially know anything about it, except something about it involving “corporate arson.” Carlos decided to just think of it on the level of corporate espionage and stop thinking about it. Maybe Isaac was finding a place for himself in Night Vale, and it made Cecil happy, so Carlos decided it made him happy, too.

“So, Carlos – what have you been up to?” Isaac said, and because of the way he said almost everything, Carlos immediately jumped to wild conclusions about telepathy or just having the smell still around him. Then he reminded himself to stop doing that.

“A lot of work. Some projects going well, some not.”

“Nothing to write home about?”

“University boards like data, not conclusions,” he said wistfully, which seemed to satisfy Isaac. For the time being.

            ****************************************

Time passed. That was the best way to describe things; time was funny in Night Vale. Carlos was aware that calendar-wise, he hadn’t been dating Cecil for very long, certainly not long enough to be living in his apartment, but yet nothing felt rushed. He didn’t forget about the House That Did Not Exist, certainly, but he found reasons not to investigate it any further, and the Secret Police stopped their extra tails and surveillance. The issue would never leave Carlos’s mind, but he knew there was nothing to do about it now, both because he was being watched and because he didn’t know what to do if given the chance. He would probably speak to Armitage about it during his next trip to Massachusetts, but that was it. It seemed as good a plan as any.

His concerns shifted to Cecil, who was coming home extremely tired and seemed to be called to HR retraining a lot, if only for brief periods. He wasn’t doing anything exceptional on the show, like going on too much about Carlos, or mentioning unmentionable things, or talking about his contract. But he did explain while smoking a rare cigarette on the back porch that Station Management seemed to be a bad mood. “They just get like this sometimes. Moody. If they were mad about a particular thing, they would make it clear.”

“I assume you’ve tried talking to them – if that’s possible?”

Cecil shrugged tiredly. “I tried yesterday, but I’ve never had much success with them, and they vaporize anyone else who comes near.”

“Can they – I don’t know, leave? Take a vacation?”

“No, Carlos. Dear Carlos. They’re as trapped in the station as I am. If anything, even more so.” He actually sounded sympathetic, and Carlos dropped it. He was less sympathetic as the week drew on and the situation didn’t change. Cecil looked paler, thinner even, and he was avoiding time spent in the studio, writing a lot of material from home and doing intern reporting work himself to delay his arrival. Management was not calming down and their mood was not passing, and while they were clearly upset about something, Cecil couldn’t make out what it was, only that it probably wasn’t his work, which was usually the only thing they cared about. His shows were just fine – cautious, even. He just couldn’t talk to them directly, even if he wanted to.

It showed at the next family dinner, though Cecil was hesitant to talk about it. Isaac swung by the lab the next day and Carlos’s assistants scattered, which Isaac pretended not to notice. “Who is Station Management? What are they?”

Carlos was briefly touched by Isaac’s concern for his brother, even if he was making it seem like an idle curiosity. “I don’t know. Cecil is the only one who can really get near the door.”

“You’ve never asked him directly?”

Carlos shrugged. “I did at one time, in so many words. I think Cecil knows more than he’s saying, but he doesn’t feel that it’s relevant to anyone but him. Or maybe he came by some information that he shouldn’t have. Cecil almost never refuses to answer a question, so when he does I’ve just respected it.”

“He says he’s never seen them.”

“That’s true. Cecil never lies. He definitely hasn’t looked at them directly.”

“I looked up the building plans for that station for my architecture class.” Isaac was now a full-time student at the community college, even if he wasn’t in a formal degree program. “They weren’t easy to get, but they are on record. That building’s not just a radio station. It wouldn’t have been designed like that, if it was just an ordinary radio station.”

“I figured as much,” Carlos replied. Architecture wasn’t his strong suite, especially in Night Vale. Cecil occasionally made fun of him for it. “Can you be more specific?”

“It’s seen drawings of structures like that – like how it looks in blue prints – in my dreams. In places that don’t exist here. The man who built it – Randolph Carter?”

“The first Voice of Night Vale, I think.”

“He knew some things an ordinary person shouldn’t have known.” Isaac smiled in that unsettling way of his. “That tower’s a trap. It’s a cage for something a normal cage wouldn’t hold. A tomb for a living thing.”

“Station Management.”

“Probably.” Isaac hopped over to the white board and began to draw obscure symbols within a square building surrounded by another square building turned on an angle, resembling an octagon. “I won’t draw it here. I’m not that stupid. You can’t really see it in the blue prints if you don’t know what you’re looking for, but the building is like one giant Elder Sign. It protects or imprisons, probably both.”

Carlos was relieved; he didn’t want Isaac drawing an Elder sign on his wall, even in illegal erasable marker. “I take it this is a sudden interest?”

“You’ve seen how Cecil looks. Something’s affecting him, and it’s affecting Management, too. But I don’t think it originates from the station. It would be too obvious; I would like to think I would notice a drastic change in something I already have some interest in.” He was fascinated with Cecil’s abilities to change the way the town thought. “I think it’s somewhere else, and they’re more sensitive to it because the station doesn’t just broadcast. It receives.”

Carlos did a mental calculation of how long since he noticed the signs in Cecil that this was going on, and he gave himself a lot of credit for not collapsing in terror right there. All of that suppressed fear hiding in his spine spread out like roots growing in fresh soil. He could not stay on his feet; he found a stool.

“So you know what it is.”

It was not an accusation. Isaac looked rather pleased with himself. Maybe he’d suspected all along, and the conversation was just to confirm it. Maybe he knew himself. No – he’d never have come to Carlos if he knew himself.

“I – I can’t tell you.” He didn’t want to tell anyone at all. Nor did he think he had it in him now. “I’m not going to.”

“Still don’t trust me, do you?”

“Not a chance.”

Isaac laughed. “I can’t say I blame you.” He repositioned his crutches and headed for the door.

“Isaac, wait!” Carlos grabbed his arm, and Isaac whipped back, unused to physical contact. “I’m doing this for your own safety.”

“Really.”

“Yes. Because I love Cecil, and Cecil loves you. And even if we didn’t have that connection ... you’re a person, and you don’t deserve to be hurt by something out of our control. Or in someone’s control. If you won’t be careful, I’ll be careful for you.”

Isaac did not have a witty retort to that. He stared at him blankly for a moment. His eyes flickered behind their double lids before he recovered. “Suit yourself.”

He saw himself out of the lab, and the air around him was subdued. Carlos didn’t stop him. Carlos had other things to do – like find out what he had accidentally unleashed on Night Vale. 


	2. Express Delivery

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Seriously, trigger warnings. Check them.
> 
> In 32 years I've never written a scene like this, so I would be interested to know if I did it well.

Chapter 2

1994

Cecil Baldwin sat under the poor shade of the mesquite tree and smoked his City Council-mandated cigarette. He didn’t enjoy it; he wasn’t a teenager anymore so a lot of the thrill had worn off and he’d given the damn things up in college to save money. But it did give him a reason to go outside during a work day. He had never been someone who was bothered excessively by the desert heat, even in the early afternoon when you could see the asphalt baking in the sun. He just preferred nights because the didn’t come with sunburns and he could look up into the hoary void without damaging his retinas. Most of the time.

“Wow, aren’t you the little go-getter?”

“Fuck you,” he said to the approaching figure who was difficult to make out because of the sun, not that he didn’t know Dean’s form from a mile away, especially with his camera bag. “I’m taller than you. And at least I have a job to be shirking.”

Dean Curwen, like a lot of budding journalists and filmmakers, was a contract worker. Sometimes he recorded audio for the radio station and sometimes he was hired to film press conferences or important civic events. As to what he’d actually like to be doing, that was somewhat unclear, but he sure liked playing with expensive equipment and he would usually return rentals in one piece.

Reliability over quality was a particular issue Cecil had with his current place of work, but the Daily Journal’s issues didn’t relate too much to Dean. In the morning he was called to the carpet for refusing to copy-edit an editorial by Steve Carlsberg. So, old news.

“I was going to hit up the mine shaft. See if there’s anything good left. Sad pictures of abandoned work stations and all that,” Dean explained. “Before the police come in and tear the place up.”

“We weren’t allowed to print that they bought it,” Cecil said. It was not in fact very common knowledge. “But what are they going to do? Build a welcome center?”

“If you had to handle illegal detainments and interrogations 24/7, would you want to do it in an actual abandoned mine shaft still filled with blood or would you like, I don’t know, something with fresh air pumped in?”

Dean had a point. Cecil stamped out his cigarette. “Why do you want me to go? I’m not going to find any material down there.”

“But you know it pretty well, don’t you? You wrote a lot about the explosion. So that means you know at least four times as much.” Dean kicked the ground impatiently. “I don’t want to die in a mine shaft and end up haunting a torturer’s break room. So let’s get going already.”

Cecil didn’t put up an argument. He left a quick note on his desk and climbed into Dean’s car, which was really his father’s car, which explained how he could afford a vehicle.

“So what do you think really caused the explosion?”

“Corporate malfeasance.”

“That’s what you _wrote_ – “

Cecil turned on the radio. Even though they were going to talk over it, he liked Al’s voice in the background. “Sometimes we do this crazy thing at the Journal where we tell the truth and it isn’t that interesting. Strexcorp shorted the minors on oxygen tanks and other supplies. That’s why the death toll was so high. There is an ancient spirit down there, but he was nowhere near the area where they were working and he doesn’t grant interviews.”

“But if you could get an interview?”

“I would have other things to ask him. I’m sure he’s heard a lot of interesting things over the last ten thousand years.” He perked up a bit as they left the part of the town with actual buildings. “You really think there’s anything down there? Other than explosive pockets of poison gas?”

“Maybe.” Dean was optimistic. He liked gory pictures. They arrived at the opening to the shaft and hopped over the barriers erected by the police, as any good reporters would. If it came down to it, Cecil had a press pass. There wasn’t much down there he didn’t recognize – stale, wet air, the faint smell of charred human remains, and a lot of abandoned miner helmets. They couldn’t go deeper because the elevator had been wisely disabled for the time being.

Dean emerged disappointed and with only a few shots in his camera. “Hey, is that new?” He pointed to the trailer partially blocked by debris and piles of dirt spilled out after being lugged out for the rescue dig. The wheels were missing, so it was meant to at least be a semi-permanent structure.

“It belonged to on-site coordinator for Strexcorp,” Cecil said. “I don’t know what happened in there, but it was bloody when they finally let us in. It was looted for its copper piping and generator. And the air conditioner – someone pulled it right out of the wall. There’s nothing particularly interesting in there.”

That didn’t stop an overeager Dean Curwen from prying open the aluminum door with his trusty crowbar and having a look inside. It was a very small trailer, really an office for one person, completely with overturned metal desk. The floor was covered in bloodstained newspapers and paperwork that had been strewn about when the shelves were looted for evidence and possibly just office supplies. Pens were expensive in Night Vale.

“He had a personal computer,” Cecil said. “That was the first thing they took.”

“But they left perfectly good teeth?” Dean handed Cecil the camera bag and knelt down to scoop some up. “Does no one else need ritual items?”

“You’re going to get in trouble for that stuff one day,” Cecil replied. He had his mandatory education in the religious rituals required for Night Vale daily life, but he only took one esoteric elective in scrying and felt it was a complete waste of his time. He could have brought in a class paperweight instead of shelling out for a crystal ball and probably had the same vague results.

“Hey, families have their traditions.” And Dead had had a real family, with parents, and grandparents that he said he could remember. His father took a job in Pine Cliffs and came back in an envelope so small it showed how thorough they were in their cremation process. His mother disappeared during his college years and they found her body in the desert, crushed by a now-deteriorating humpback whale. Cecil had been emphatic, but once Dean was past it (which seemed oddly quickly) he was jealous of Dean’s inheritance, something Cecil wasn’t particularly proud of. “Do you want to check out back?”

Cecil shrugged. As it was better than just standing there, he walked around but only found broken glass from the windows and a partial goat carcass covered in flies. He had finished the loop when he noticed the mail slot outside the door. To his surprise, it was unopened, and he pulled out a bunch of letters, some span catalogs, and a surprisingly heavy package marked “express” but still small enough to fit in the container. “Hey, do you want to read mail from Desert Bluffs?”

“I guess so. Nothing else here.” Dean indicated for Cecil to throw it in the backseat of the car while he carefully stowed away the photographic equipment in the trunk. “I think it’s a federal offense to open someone else’s mail.”

“Does it count of they’re dead?”

“I happen to know it does not,” Dean said with a sly smile on his face as he climbed into the car.

It wasn’t a long ride, but it seemed like a long ride, and Dean pulled over in a back lot. His stop didn’t require a lot of explanation as he opened the car door and vomited out the side.

“Do you want to go to the hospital?” Cecil rubbed his back. “You might have swallowed some poison gas.”

“Nah, I’ll be fine. I inhaled all kinds of gases after we lost to Desert Bluffs in Junior year. This is nothing.” But he was obviously too shaky to drive, so Cecil drove him home and helped him carry the equipment inside. Dean forced down some water and eventually leftover soda, but he still seemed to be shivering. He only let Cecil leave after he promised to call in the morning.

Dean did call before Cecil left for work to say he was much better, and was taking his film over to be processed. Cecil had had a weird night – strange dreams, waking a few times very hungry but unable to think of anything he wanted to eat – and he slammed through his copy-editing and layout work so he could take off early. He knew there was almost nothing in Dean’s refrigerator so he picked up sandwiches at the deli counter at Ralphi’s before heading over. He hadn’t been invited, but he was concerned.

Dean met him in his pajamas, and confessed he hadn’t left the house even though he was feeling fine. He accepted the sandwiches. “You take good care of people.”

“Well, you know.” Cecil shrugged, and looked at Dean’s car. “Do you mind if I look at that mail from Desert Bluffs?”

“Sure. I don’t think I’m going to do anything with it.”

Cecil opened the car and retrieved it from the front seat, but he noticed the large package was missing. Everything else was in place, with a rubber band around it, but there was nothing but letters and business mailings. He followed Dean inside. “Hey did you see the package that was the mail? Marked express?”

Dean gestured to the kitchen table, which was empty except for the unopened large envelope. “You carried it in.”

“No I didn’t.” He distinctly remembered carrying the camera equipment because it wasn’t safe to leave it in the car, and being concerned for Dean’s health. And the rest of the mail that it had been surrounded by was still in his hands.

“Whatever.” Dean finished the first half of the sandwich and picked upt he package. It had layers of packaging tape over the standard sticky envelope lining, and he gave up after a new minutes and retrieved a knife from the drawer.

Cecil was flipping through the envelopes from Strexcorp, looking for something good, when there was a strange, audible pop as the package came open and a weird, harsh smell. Dean immediately opened the window and waved it outside until the smell dissipated, then posted the packaging out entirely after pulling out the book inside.

The binding was relatively new, a very leather if distinction, with no other markings on the outside. Dean flipped open the cover and they could see that it had recently been rebound, as the large pages were in a far sadder state of deterioration and filled the room with the smell of must, an improvement over the previous odor. On the inside cover was a post-0it with the Strexcorp logo at the bottom.

> PROBABLY BETTER OFF WITH YOU IN NIGHT VALE.
> 
> BE WELL.

There was no signature. No indication of ownership. Nor was there a copyright page, though considering the paper looked like parchment the book probably pre-dated the period where books required that. No title page either, just the beginning of a mix of block-print letters written in Latin and notes in between written in indecipherable English.

“What happened to the guy who was supposed to get this?”

“Killed himself,” Cecil said, peering over Dean’s shoulder to get a closer look at the book. “Corporate seppuku I guess.”

“That would make this book unclaimed property. Unless someone shows up looking for it – “

“Technically we have to post about lost property in the community bulletin, but that’s only for citizens,” Cecil explained. “Desert Bluffs is terrible and their stuff is terrible. No one’s going to want it.”

“I kind of do.” Dean ran the tips of his fingers over the print. “I have some books like this, but nothing this big. I bet it’s not in the library.”

“Nothing’s really in the library.” Cecil knew for a fact that Dean’s family library was better, particularly the one in the basement, where the Sheriff’s Secret Police were not allowed to drill holes for cameras or insert listening devices in the lamps. It had something to do with a previous Curwen who had been Mayor of Night Vale, as well as the various wards carved into the floor and walls to put the basement further out of sight and mind. It would be creepy if Dean didn’t just use it as a rec room. Cecil spent a lot of time down there in college, because it was where the better parties were held. Dean had a powerful receiver on the television that got more than the allowed stations. He had a Nintendo, too, which served to make him very popular when he was in high school until someone poured beer all over it and it got inside the cartridge slot.

“Do you still know Latin?”

“Huh?” Cecil’s head was broken out of a sudden fog. “Pretty well, yeah. People send us editorials in it.”

“I want to read this book,” Dean said with a very sudden intensity he flipped through it. “There’s gotta be ... something here.” There were pictures, graphs, charts, notes in the margins – it looked like a big production. “I don’t know what. But something.”

Deciding it was a lot better than looking over invoices and electricity bills, Cecil set the mail aside and joined him.

            ****************************************

It was a hypnotic. Like a slow, beautiful chant. They weren’t chanting anything, of course. They didn’t know the tunes and they aren’t that stupid. Dean did clean up his bloodstone altar and put up extra wards against spirits who spied on those who had trouble with pronunciation. They took turns, scrambling through Latin, English, Sumerian, Akaadian, what Cecil was pretty sure was un-modified Sumerian, Polynesian – however they could pronounce the words, they did. It was not reading so much as reciting even though they didn’t know _what_ they were reciting. They would go back later and try to translate the text, and would come up with nonsense.

> UP THE MAGNETIC POLE/
> 
> DREAMERS ALL SLEEPING/
> 
> CRY FOUL AND CRY LONG

Dean had a better familiarity with ritual texts, having minored in them at college, and he said there was logic to it, as if they were examining a fruit with a thick rind. They could smell it, almost taste it, but they couldn’t get to it. The scent became sweeter over time. Their sessions, which were moved to the basement, grew longer, and Cecil would sometimes pass out on the couch when the sun came up so he could have just a few hours of sleep before he was due at work. Dean didn’t seem to be sleeping at all. When he wasn’t reading the book he was pouring through other ones, making notes and looking for clues.

The book didn’t appear that long based on its size, but when they put the bookmark in and closed it they could see they weren’t past the very beginning. While Dean was actually at work on a contract job he couldn’t avoid, Cecil did some experimenting of his own. He measured the book, then held up other books of the same size to it, but nothing ever matched. It was never in the same place when he left and returned – it _seemed_ to be, but always slightly different. He tried counting the pages, but after about four hundred he would inevitably lose his count. None of this particularly bothered him. He’d seen magical books before, and he was of a particularly constant person himself in shape or size. Instead, it intrigued him. It had the pull of real mystery, not just something to be examined for an article. There were real clues to chase, the kind that could get away if he didn’t think hard enough or work fast enough. He could taste the chase, which sometimes made him so nervous and tense his hands would shake and he couldn’t get around his reemerging stutter, and Dean had to take over the reading while Cecil collapsed in embarrassment over something he thought he had licked.

It started seeping into his working hours. When he actually showed up, he would spend the time tunelessly humming to himself. After an unusual number of dressing downs from the boss, he told Dean he needed to take a break.

“I’m not sleeping enough,” he said, wearily looking at the book between them with hunger. “If they ever find another copy-editor, I’m through. I need to put in the time. Write a few articles, maybe an editorial. That kind of thing.”

Dean admitted that he had been neglecting contracts and felt he needed time to do outside research. He felt he could get books on intra-library one if he found the right meat for the required sacrifices, and that had to come in on special order. The Ralph’s also didn’t have salts made from the ashes of burned mummies, just cats and other small pets. Usually cats. So they talked each other into taking a break.

Cecil didn’t know what to do with his time. He tried watching municipally-approved television while enjoying his mandatory nicotine gum, but he lost the thread of the storylines. He slept but didn’t feel rested, like his body was just killing more time.

“Are you okay?” Earl asked. “Cecil!” And that’s when Cecil turned and looked at Earl Harlan for the first time even though their shopping carts were parallel to each other in the grocery aisle.

“Sorry.” Cecil shook himself out of his trance of trying to decide on frozen TV dinners, which was taking longer than it needed to. “Yeah, I’m fine. Why do you ask?”

“I was just going to ask how you’ve been, but you didn’t answer the first three times,” Earl said sheepishly, but pretty much everything he did was sheepish. He even wore his assistant scoutmaster uniform sheepishly. “I haven’t seen you around.”

“I haven’t seen you, either,” Cecil replied defensively.

“Yeah, but I’ve been around,” Earl said, and it was easy to understand what he meant. Unless he was on a camping trip, he was with the scouts, and they went everywhere. “You look like you haven’t slept in a week.”

“Nicotine patches,” Cecil said, knowing it would be a suitable lie. A lot of people were having insomnia as a result of the tobacco-based health regimen. Plenty of people wrote into the paper about it. It was also one of the rare pieces of legislation that Al reported on but did not also heartily endorse, which meant he hated it.

Earl nodded knowingly. He was always so easy to fool. Cecil felt a pang of guilt; he had no reason to be so vicious to a lifelong friend, even if they hadn’t been particularly close in college. “I’ve been working on a ... media project. With Dean.”

“Dean Curwen?”

Cecil rolled his eyes. “How many other Deans do you know?” Because Cecil knew there were literally no additional ones in Night Vale. He always knew who was in Night Vale. He just assumed everyone else did too.

“Look, I know _you_ were friends with him – “

“I _am_ friends with him.”

“ – but he was always sort of a dick. To me. And other people.”

Cecil swallowed. That did accurately describe Dean through most of elementary and high school. When they were seated alphabetically, he was always in the adjacent desk to Cecil. He hadn’t been particularly mean, like the bullies, who were mostly jokes. He was too skinny and didn’t play sports, but he was a rich kid, and that meant people had a higher tolerance for him. And he hadn’t been picked for scouts, so that meant he moved in different circles than Cecil and Earl. Cecil hadn’t had much in common with him until college, when they discovered they both liked beer and writing subversive editorials they never had the nerve to submit to the college paper. And fucking, occasionally, after Dean was done stalking senior women. He had absolutely no sense of romance – he didn’t even want to cuddle, even Earl wanted to do that – but – but hey, Cecil decided junior year, it was a small town and a small community college. He had to take what life gave him. Someday he was going to meet someone and fall in love but it didn’t seem like it was going to happen at right then and there.

Earl hadn’t made that connection. He was chosen as assistant scoutmaster when he found a black rose on his pillow, and there was no reason to pursue any further education. He didn’t seem like he was unhappy about it; it was a natural fit, and he would clearly be scoutmaster someday as long as he outlived the other candidates. Cecil was happy for him, even jealous that he found his place.

It still didn’t give him a reason to judge Dean, though. “He grew up like everybody else.” Though he could think of very little evidence to support that notion for either of them. He hoped Earl didn’t press.

Of course Earl didn’t. He smiled with reassurance. “Good luck then. I have to find enough pre-sliced turkey for twenty hungry scouts.”

“I hated that stuff!”

Earl gave him a knowing grin. “Me too.”

            ****************************************

When Cecil produced enough publishable material to be in his bosses’ good graces again, he returned to the Curwen house. Dean was waiting, and thankful for the food and beers Cecil brought. It didn’t look like he’d left the house in a few days. “The thing about the magnetic poles ... I think I have it.” His notebook was full of badly-drawn charts and his kitchen table was covered in library books, all of which smelled of viscera and mace. Dean relaxed first at Cecil’s insistence, trying to explain his theory between bites of the Arby’s food and beer. After dinner he seemed a little more relaxed, probably because of the beers, and they descended to the basement.

In Cecil’s absence, Dean improved the altar. “I have good stone coming in. But it has to be shipped. We don’t have it in this region,” he explained. The ritual implements on the table beside it had increased. The wards were reinforced, to protect them from harm both inside and outside.

“It needs a bloodstone circle.”

“I already have one upstairs, and my parents were buried with theirs. I don’t want to get on the Sheriff’s radar yet,” Dean said.

Cecil wasn’t too concerned, because it wasn’t like they were going to be doing rituals, right? They were just reading. Cecil read until his mouth was parched, so eager to dive into the text after a long break. He read late into the night. It seemed to be poetry, because even with his limited Latin it made no sense but sounded beautiful when he read it. He was infatuated by it, only stopping when Dean insisted he stop to drink, that his hoarse voice was ruining it.

Dean’s voice was never so lyrical as when he began his recitation that night. He hadn’t looked at the text before on mutual agreement and yet it flowed through him so easily, the words making interesting shapes of his mouth. Even though there was no tune there was definitely an indefinable dune, as if the text itself had taken over for Dean. He became a thing of beauty, his voice spewing more than lyrics to an unplayable song.

Cecil took another swig of warm beer, then switched to cold water from the mini-fridge. The room was too warm. He lost his tie from work and unbuttoned his collar, but he wasn’t sweating profusely – just uncomfortable. The music, and it was music to him, was making him twitchy, but not in a bad way and he didn’t want it to stop. His hand strayed to Dean’s and he pulled away, terrified that it would interrupt anything and suddenly embarrassed for himself.

He was so caught up in his feelings he didn’t realize the sound had stopped.

“Cecil? Are you okay?”

He was tired of being asked that. “Can you just ... keep reading? Please?”

“Um, sure.” Dean’s eyes drifted across Cecil’s body, and Cecil squirmed and tried to fit further back in the darkness of the basement. He was so warm –

“Cecil,” Dean said with more insistence, the grin on his face making Cecil flush. “Are you getting ... turned on by this?”

“No!” His outburst was the worst possible denial and he realized he _was_. Which was creepy and weird and embarrassing but it did feel good. “No. I just need to take a break.” He stood up to go to the bathroom and get some relief, because he was terribly turned on, but Dean grabbed his wrist, and it was like electricity shooting up his arm and burying itself in his spine. How long had it been since Cecil had been touched by another person? Did a couple fumbling attempts with Earl after his college graduation party count? When was the last time he’d been with Dean? Or really interested in being with Dean? He didn’t want to be celibate, but it was a small town. Sometimes things didn’t work out and there were dry spells.

Cecil’s mouth was dry and he pulled away from Dean almost violently. “Can we just stop?”

Dean’s smile was so enticing. “Do you really want me to stop?” He was looking straight into his eyes.

Cecil was a notoriously bad liar. “No.” He sat down, crossing his legs and trying not to look at Dean as they returned to the book.

The poem came back to his ears like a rush of hot water. He could have translated it if circumstances were different, but he was in no mood for full concentration required for any kind of understanding. The words from Dean’s mouth were music. They made him think of things – the heat in his body, an unexpressed yearning he had never felt before, and an unfulfilled desire he couldn’t determine. He hid his eyes from Dean, burying his face in his hands and taking long, deep breaths. The imagery came to him unbidden and increasingly need-centric. He wasn’t just aroused, he was _hungry_ , and for things he had never imagined. Pictures of dead animals, of a building on fire and that was building was him, of the night sky being rent apart so violently that it bled – all of this was coming to him and he didn’t know what to do with it. “Stop.” This time it was a plead.

Dean shrugged and continued. It all was starting to hurt now – not just Cecil’s pressing need in his pants but the tension in his body had solidified and it needed to be drained before it made his heart stop and his lungs freeze and he couldn’t breath or move.

“Stop.” The very word exhausted him, because it was fighting against his better (or worse) instincts. Yes, definitely worse. “Just stop. Please. I don’t want to do this.” He did not have to say what “this” was.

Dean did pause, studying Cecil. “Whatever happens, I’m okay with it.” And he continued, and Cecil could barely see Dean anymore. He could just see a shape but he couldn’t focus because so much of his body was focused on other things. He didn’t know what position he was in, or where his hands were. Something was rising in him and it wasn’t familiar. It was scary. He was scared but he couldn’t express it; he was too terrified to express it. He felt chills, and not just because his paints were soaked with sweat and other fluids. He had to get free of these clothes –

He did not know when he stopped thinking for himself. Somewhere in there, he was sure, was another cry to stop, but it didn’t make it out of him. It was helpless against those terrible words in that terrible sound, and he saw it for what it was and he couldn’t _stop it_.

Dean did finally cease, and not of his own volition. When Cecil rose and clamored across the table, he didn’t seem surprised at first, even eager, but Cecil not only knocked the table away but flipped it with one arm. He did not kiss Dean, as he liked to do. He picked him up and threw him on the carpet.

The next was a blur, or it was a blur later because Cecil’s mind wouldn’t remember it, just its intensity. He remembered the sound of Dean’s pants being torn beneath him. He remembered the small struggle when he held Dean down, pinning his arms to the ground and the rest of his body with his own weight, and he _loved it_. There was pain and it wasn’t his now but Dean’s, and he reveled in it in the blurred line between what was happening and what Cecil had intended to happen. Release came after multiple, ultimately bloody thrusts and he loved the smell of the blood. He loved the feeling of the tension and excitement leaving him, being replaced by contentment on a whole new level of experience. His body was flooded with happy tingling and he only saw stars as he rolled over and lay on the old, filthy carpet, the only sound his own panting.

Slowly, over what must have been a great deal of time, whatever was in him retreated, and he felt the dopamine bliss recede quietly, and he was no longer gulping for air. He managed to sit up on very shaky arms and this time he smelled the blood and it didn’t smell enticing. The strange smell of sex was tainted by blood and anxious sweat and he heard grunts of pain from Dean as he tried to get up, initially failing.

What happened began to dawn on him slowly, like an approaching train still off in the distance, but he could see the headlights coming and hear the thunderous wheels on the track. “Oh my G-d.” The voice he spoke with was small and weak and scared in a different way than he had been scared before. It was one of well-deserved shame. “Dean? Dean, are you – “

“I’m fine,” Dean said, failing to pull up his ruined pants before there was nothing else to wear available in the basement. His lie was pained and obvious even for Dean, who was fairly good at lying.

Cecil wanted to protest that he didn’t know what happened and hadn’t been himself, but even if it was true the words died before reaching his mouth and he rushed on unsteady feet to at least get the spare blanket from the couch and wrap Dean in it. His friend Dean, who retreated from his touch. “I don’t know – I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“I’m fine,” Dean said, with more anger. “I just – need a break. And some pants.”

“Oh my G-d I’m so sorry – “

“Cecil stop _freaking out_ ,” Dean said so harshly it was almost an order, even though Dean was still scared. Scared of _him_. “I’m going to get cleaned up.”

He did not offer any help for Cecil, though he deserved his privacy. Cecil wondered if it would be right or rude to leave while Dean was upstairs. There wasn’t really a guide for this. He washed up in the bathroom, surprised to find his mouth full of blood. Where had it come from? Had he bitten Dean? He didn’t remember it. All of the details were getting fuzzy, and not just because he was tired. He was too wound up to be sleepy.

Cecil had come to no decision when Dean returned. “I should turn in.” Cecil reached for him and Dean flinched away, but mustered at the last moment. “Do you need a ride home?”

“I h-have my bike.”

“Then I’ll, um, see you tomorrow. After work.”

“Ok-kay.” Cecil hated his stutter, and it brought out a vicious sense of embarrassment. “Are you sure –“

“Yes I’m sure.” Dean gave him that look again. Like, _why the fuck are you still bothering me? Go home, you worthless piece of shit_. He added, far less harshly, “Sorry. I don’t know where that came from.”

But they both knew where it came from.

            ****************************************

Cecil knew what he was supposed to do. He was supposed to drink to forget, but he felt guilty enough to not want to.

There was a message on his answering machine at work when he got there. Dean wanted to talk to him without actually talking to him. He said that he was fine but he needed a break, and would call later in the week. Cecil understood this all perfectly, and prepped himself for days (or possibly weeks, or months) of well-deserved anxiety. He nearly broken down right in the hallway when he saw the list from the Night Vale General Hospital emergency room, something they would get but were supposed to be circumspect about, and saw Dean had been seen at some point in the early morning, then released, no stated reason.

He spent the days staring at his typewriter, trying and failing to come up with something that could be a suitable apology. When he couldn’t he drowned himself in work, staying late into the night until the paper went to press and the office shut down.

To a combination of horror and disbelief, Cecil got a call from Dean on Friday, asking him to come over because Dean had some new findings, and could he pick up something from Big Rico’s or Pizza Barn on the way? Obviously he wasn’t paying attention to the news, because Pizza Barn had burned down again and this time it probably wasn’t insurance fraud because there was no way anyone was falling for that again. Cecil contemplated buying flowers but realized the gesture would be embarrassing for both of them and ultimately insulting. He wasn’t Dean’s abusive boyfriend. He was just ... well, if he didn’t know before, he certainly didn’t know now.

Dean was astonishing cruel in that he didn’t bring it up. He didn’t seem to want to bring it up. He went on about some supplementary books he’d been reading, and how much they were helping him, and that he’d ordered more books on Sumerian because he just wasn’t good enough at running translation. He got the point across very early that he wanted to continue.

“I can’t do it without you,” Dean said. “I tried. It’s too hard.” He did not specify _how_ it was hard, and Cecil did not ask.

“Dean...” Cecil’s eyes drifted to Dean’s arms, which were still bruised despite the passage of time. There were bandages on his elbows and some of his fingers. “I _hurt yo_ u. Please don’t act like I didn’t.”

Dean shook his head. “I know it wasn’t you. And, okay, this is not great for me to admit so just keep it between us, but it was not the worst sex of my life.” He added, showing a spark of the old Curwen mischievousness, “You were always too gentle anyway. Such a softie.”

It was hard to tell if Dean was lying, maybe because what he was saying was not honest but was mixed with truth. “I’m not doing that again. I’m never doing that again. Maybe I didn’t act like it at the time, but it was terrifying.”

“So we won’t do any passages if we start to feel weird. Or we’ll just stop. No means no and all that. But I still need you.” There was hunger in his eyes. “I want to go forward but I can’t do it without you. I can’t really explain why. Maybe it’s because we started it together, or the book decided – I don’t know. Don’t ask me. But it’s what I want. Are you going to abandon me now?”

No. Of course he wasn’t.


	3. Third Party

Chapter 3

2013

Carlos stood in the doorway to his lab, staring at a car which was not a sporty hybrid mini-coop, now otherwise the only car in Night Vale since FEMA had “gifted” them all with them. It was a black sedan with tinted windows.

“The Mayor would like to see you,” Trish Hidge said, clutching her surely unnecessary clipboard as there was nothing she could write down on it.

“Now, I take it.” He was not dressed for an office meeting. He was an old lab coat and what was barely above pajamas under it.

Trish smiled disconcertingly. “She would appreciate it.”

He grabbed his iPad and climbed into the cool, refreshing car, which smelled of leather and well-preserved alcohol. There was no conversation and the ride was exceedingly long, looping several times around Night Vale as if to make sure he lost the trail, which might have worked had they had anywhere mysterious to go or had he not had a good view of the road from his seat. They ended up in the scrublands, of course, where everything ominous seemed to happen.

The Mayor’s one-room office was there, in the middle of the dirt road. It wasn’t a whole building, just the actual room that was the office – four walls, a door, and a ceiling, as if someone had plucked it out of a larger building and set it here. Carlos did not hesitate at Trish’s gesture and was not surprised to enter a well-maintained, air conditioned room which had a window that was not ground-level and did not face the scrublands.

Mayor Pamela Winchell rose from her seat to shake his hand. “Professor Mencia.”

No one had ever called him that in Night Vale. No one had spoken either of those words, and certainly not in concert. He wasn’t even sure Cecil knew them. “You can call me – “

“Your file says you don’t stand on ceremony, nor do you care for the unfortunate recent popularity of a certain terrible stand-up comedian. So. Carlos.”

He blushed. “It was worse when he had his own show.” He took a seat in a very plush guest chair. It was all very official, with her seal office on the desk, even if the word “interim” was written on a piece of paper with a sharpie and was taped hastily to her nameplate.

“I suppose you know why you’re here.”

“Not really, but I do have a couple of theories.” Carlos decided he had no reason to be mad; this was far more pleasant than the police’s way of giving him even the most innocuous messages, even in the form of rearranged magnets on his refrigerator when he woke in the morning.

“I don’t want to discourage you from your investigation of what has been called, ‘The House that Does Not Exist, even though I know it’s a outside your more traditional field.”

“I’m an environmental scientist.”

She had a file on his desk, presumably his, which was unopened. “I read your dissertation on the evolutionary effects of global warming on hot-dry climate insects.”

“That would make you maybe the fifth person to do that.” He couldn’t help but be amused. The other four were the professors attacking his thesis during the defense.

The mayor smiled pleasantly. “We don’t get a lot of Outsiders in Night Vale who stay as long as you have. So.” She tapped on the desk. “Is there something you think you can do about the house?”

“I don’t know what to ... do, exactly.” And he didn’t want to say what he’d found in there, because she had yet to reveal if she knew. “I have made the connection between the house and the troubles at the radio station, but I don’t have a lot of direct evidence to support the thesis.”

“Then you understand why we have reason to be concerned. Station Management is very upset at the recent disturbance.” She did not explain how she knew that. “Perhaps we can get you a bit more up to speed.”

This was the first time anyone in a position of political authority had offered him any significant information about how things worked in Night Vale, so all he could think of was, “Why aren’t you handling it? Why me?”

“Because by all reports the house responded to you, and we have our suspicions as to why,” she said. The one connecting thread, of course, between the house and the station was Cecil. “In the past twenty years, that house has been burned down, knocked down, disassembled, and torn off its foundations and flown away. These changes have only proved temporary. Obviously, it has restored itself every time. If we could do anything about it, we would.”

“What happened twenty years ago?”

The mayor seemed pleased at the pace this conversation was moving along. “The Sheriff has never officially told me. Politicians come and go, and had I been in Night Vale at the time, my memory would have been erased like everyone else’s. But I was outside the town for work, and I did hear about the explosion in Radon Canyon that ended it all.”

Radon Canyon. Deputy Sheriff Mitchell had told him all about that, in so many words. What happened to Cecil, who didn’t know or particularly want to remember it. Mitchell had said someone had manipulated him, turned him into a monster, but he didn’t say who.

“When I returned several years later and went through normal reeducation to integrate me back into the town, they couldn’t possibly take everything they needed to. These things can get too hard to keep track of and I was gone for years. So what is why I remembered Dean Curwen, the last surviving member of the once-mighty Curwen family, and the last resident of that house. Who now longer exists and has in fact never existed in Night Vale.”

The name didn’t ring a bell, but by its very nature it wouldn’t have. “What did he do?”

“No one’s sure, exactly. There was some attempt to establish a chain of events in the investigation that followed the atomic explosion, but what I’ve heard from sources is that it flew under their radar for months. Possibly years. Back then you could avoid the police if you wanted to and he must have established very on that he wanted to. Dean majored in communications, but he minored in esoteric media. He was a few years behind me.”

“Cecil’s age.”

“Cecil was the last person I saw him with,” the mayor said. “He was working at the Daily Journal and Dean was a freelance journalist. Something in multimedia because he could afford all of the gadgets you needed for that. His family has a long history in Night Vale – three Curwen mayors, one of them being his uncle. Of course the town is small so mall and we go through mayors so quickly there’s practically one in everyone’s family history, if we allowed people to study history in a thorough and honest manner. I don’t know what they were up to, but they worked together. This must have been at least three years before the incident so it’s not necessarily indicative of anything, but if you want to follow history here you have to connect the dots.”

Surely Cecil wasn’t stupid enough to mess around with the Necronomicon? If he was taught about it, sure. Carlos reminded himself that the school system didn’t thrive on open communication. Cecil was thorough in his knowledge of daily rituals and religious requirements but had only a passing interest in what Carlos would have referred to as “superstition” two years ago. There wasn’t a single book in his apartment that wasn’t municipally acceptable.

But Cecil was different back then, Mitchell had told him.

“You realize,” Carlos said, “how much easier this would be if we just _told Cecil_.”

The mayor pursed her lips. Her mind was mulling over something. “Years ago, I was told – and not by the police – that doing so would have consequences. Even if he never actually remembers, and is merely given details, the effects will be traumatic. And despite this nonsense with Hiram McDaniels that Cecil has been going on about because he’s a nutcase who has to fill airtime, I don’t actually want that to ever happen to him.”

Carlos didn’t, either. He wanted to treat Cecil like the adult he was, but he didn’t want to see him hurt. “I’m only willing to table this issue. What do you want from me?”

“What do you need?”

“An unmonitored computer with access to the real internet, a satellite or cell phone that is not tapped and can make and receive calls from outside Night Vale reliably, an armed escort for the library, and somewhere to work where no one’s looking through the window or inserting listening devices.” He added, “For their safety as well as mine.”

The mayor didn’t blink before answering, “Anything else, Professor?”

            ****************************************

The equipment arrived ten minutes after he showed up for work the next morning. He signed for it and was told to go get some coffee, and when he returned the spare room in his lab had been completely converted into a functioning office with decent furniture and a working wireless connection. A ‘NO ENTRY’ sign was posted on the door for his assistants, who were not allowed to help him.

To test the system, he searched for and ordered several wheat products and books on clouds, all of which arrived with overnight shipping with their packaging unopened and the seals unbroken. He moved the toaster from the kitchen into his office so he could enjoy a nice breakfast as he began requesting books from libraries and researching what he could on the different known editions of the Necronomicon. He held off on contacting Professor Armitage, not really sure what he would say to him.

The work did keep him in the office, which he felt particularly guilty about while Cecil was home most of the day, going to work only an hour ahead of broadcast and still coming home exhausted. Management was zapping interns left and right so he was low on helpers and doing investigations in person, which he said he preferred to being around the office. Carlos did manage to make him dinner but it involved a lot of boxes with the word “instant” on the label. In the late evening, Carlos worked from the couch, where Cecil lay with his head in Carlos’s lap and some black-and-white movie played in the background. Neither of them were paying attention and Carlos ran his fingers through Cecil’s hair every so often.

“Cecil,” he said when he decided he could hold it in no longer, “Does the name Dean Curwen mean anything to you?”

Cecil lifted his head, which had slumped into Carlos’s hip, so he was looking up. “No. Should it?”

Carlos noted the innocent look on Cecil’s face and his heart crumbled. “I’m working on a project for the mayor. Well, sort of. I was doing an investigation and she offered some city resources to help. Before you get excited – “

But Cecil jumped upright with more passion than he had done anything in weeks. “An _investigation?_ Does it involve journalism? Because I am an excellent investigator!”

“I know, I know.” Carlos kissed him on the cheek. “It’s a scientific investigation and I wanted to mention it because it’s taking up all of my time, but I can’t talk about it yet.”

“Ooooo, a _secret_ investigation.” Cecil’s eyes went wide. Wider than they should have been. “Does it involve Hiram McDaniels?”

“Cecil, what would be scientifically interesting about Hiram McDaniels?”

Cecil crossed his arms. “I wasn’t about to be presumptuous about what you find interesting, Carlos.” He leaned over and rested his head on Carlos’s shoulder. “Sweet Carlos. Sweet, intelligent, investigative, lo – “

“Now I just think I shouldn’t have told you.”

“Fine then.” Cecil made a “humph” sound in an exaggerated manner. “I won’t ask. But you will tell me when you can.”

“Of course.” When he could. He just didn’t know when that would possibly be.

            ****************************************

The problem solved itself.

Cecil showed up at the lab in the late afternoon, something he never did. “I’m going to be in the booth, but I don’t think there’s going to be a show tonight. The equipment’s not working.”

He looked worried, of course. Carlos wished he knew anything about audio equipment or broadcasting. But Cecil knew plenty, so if he couldn’t fix it, there was probably no one who could. “What did Management say?” He didn’t care about Station Management, but he cared about what they could do to Cecil.

“It’s hard to get anything out of them. They just bang against the door. Or maybe the door’s banging itself because of their anger? Either way, they won’t send me envelopes. The microphone still works, but it doesn’t broadcast. The tower is messed up and the essential equipment is in Management’s office.” He scratched his head. He looked like a mess. “I have to do the show. It’s in my contract. I can never not do the show. But no one will hear it.”

“I’ll come,” Carlos said, taking Cecil’s shaking hand and holding it tight.

The show did proceed as normal, except that no one was able to call in and update Cecil on something he had said because there were no listeners. Cecil sounded like himself, but the undertones were lonely and despondent. They got out of the station, now emptied of interns, as quickly as possible. It took some nudging to get Cecil to eat and go to bed, and only when he was sound asleep did Carlos open his computer again and resume reading. He could not find anything about destroying the Necronomicon. He wasn’t sure he could get to it again, but he had to try.

He delayed his departure for work that morning. Cecil was too despondent. He refused to eat and he was very pale; clearly being in the radio station was not the only problem. Carlos sat him down and practically forced him to watch an Animal Planet marathon of “Cats 101.”

The doorbell rang and Carlos answered. He assumed it was the Secret Police, checking up on Cecil or with demands about the broadcast, but it was Mayor Winchell. She was still very professionally dressed in a dark pantsuit, but her hair, which was normally up in a tight bun, was down. There was no sign of her car or anyone else present. She had nothing with her but a manila envelope. “I need to speak with Cecil.”

“In private?”

She shrugged. “It’ll probably go better with you around. Cecil?”

Cecil leapt off the soda and stood at attention. “Mayor Winchell! I am so pleased at being granted an exclusive interview! Let me get my recorder – “

“ _Cecil_ ,” she said in a commanding but familiar tone. “Sit down. I’m not here to talk politics.”

Cecil wilted a little. “Is this about the Hiram thing?”

“No, it’s not.” She sounded almost ... affectionate. She looked him over. “So life hasn’t been treating you much better, I see.”

“No! Of course not! I have a boyfriend and a great job and there’s a marathon on TV that’s just a parade of kittens – “

The mayor rolled her eyes, but patiently. “I have something for you. It’s from Al.”

Cecil’s intonations could turn on a dime; Carlos heard it often on the radio. He had never _seen_ it. Cecil stopped bouncing around, stopped trying to be reassuring, and settled into an apprehensive look with just a hint of a different kind of excitement. “I’m sorry. Would you like some tea?”

The mood was completely different as they moved to the kitchen and sat around the table. The two most powerful figures in Night Vale were sitting nervously, but with the sort of expressions of concerned friends, not sometimes-squabbling public figures. Carlos felt like an intruder but Cecil let his hand drift over Carlos’s – not too tightly, just to indicate that he wanted him there. They all stared at the envelope on the table, really more of a small package. On the side facing up was a wax seal with the NVCR logo stamped into it.

“Pam and I were interns together,” Cecil said, breaking the silence and answering the obvious question. “She was the only one to complete the internship. The others left when they found out they weren’t chosen to be the Voice of Night Vale.”

“If you want to do anything in politics, you have to be an intern,” she explained. “I wanted Algonquin’s recommendation, and I wanted Cecil to owe me a favor or two.” She put her fingers on the envelope, which she had yet to formally relinquish. “The Sheriff got wind the decision before we were told, and he went to Al to cut a deal. For reasons that are still unknown to me, he did not want you to be the Voice of Night Vale. He knew he couldn’t stop it, but he threatened to put up all kinds of barriers to prevent you from reporting. Eventually they settled on an agreement. You would be held back from certain powers and freedoms afforded to the Voice of Night Vale for the first ten years of your tenure.”

Cecil was dumbfounded.

“It was the best he could do under the circumstances. Since he didn’t trust the Sheriff to honor the agreement and inform you of the lapsing probationary period, he made me the third party, with specific instructions as to when it would be appropriate to reveal all of the secrets he had to lock away. He wasn’t very specific about it, actually. He just said, ‘Oh, you’ll know.’”

Cecil smiled. “That does sound like him.”

Pam cleared her throat. “He also said there were going to be things in here he couldn’t tell you when he was alive because the time wasn’t right. Things that were going to be devastating to you. He was there for you in the years you worked at the Journal. The ones you’re missing.” She didn’t need to specify. “So you can open it, but he told me to tell you that it’s going to go deep. You’re not going to like what he has to tell you. So you have the option to stop reading whenever you want to.”

Carlos wondered if Cecil, who held Algonquin in such high regard, would ever be able to do that.

“He said it’s not a challenge,” Pam reinforced, thinking the same things Carlos was, because Al had already thought out all these things. “It’s not a test. You will always be the Voice of Night Vale. This part of it is up to you.”

Cecil said nothing and they let him sit with his cooling tea, his hands at his sides instead of on the table, but never taking his eyes off the package.

“Why now?”

“Because of the problems at the station,” she said, “and because now you have Carlos.”

            ****************************************

After warmly seeing the mayor off, Cecil returned to the table, staring at the package as if its mysteries would reveal themselves to him if he just sat quietly and waited.

“I wanted to tell you,” Carlos said, “what Mitchell told me, that time I talked to him when you applied for permission to leave Night Vale. He said it in the strictest confidence and you said you didn’t want to know what he said. You trusted his judgment.”

“But you didn’t.”

“I’m a scientist. I gather data. I want to learn things. I want to know things. I told him you had a right to know. That you were an adult.” He tugged on Cecil’s hang, wrapping his fingers around it. “Whatever you think this letter says about who you were, I’m still going to love you all the same.”

Cecil smiled gratefully, and cut the package open, careful not to damage the seal. There was an actual letter inside, hand-written in beautiful but legible calligraphy on thick cardstock. It was tied up with string, and beneath it was a small book and another, smaller sealed envelope.

Seeing how person the introduction was, Carlos got up from the table and left Cecil to read.

            ****************************************

> _Dear Cecil,_
> 
> _If Pam has give you this letter in accordance with my wishes, then you have been the Voice of Night Vale for more than ten years, and my agreement with the Sheriff has lapsed. There were many things I couldn’t tell you then that I can tell you now. As I believe I once told you, a great deal of radio is timing. You must find the right moment to say the right thing. It is perhaps the most difficult part of the job._
> 
> _However this letter finds you, know that I am proud of you for everything you have accomplished in your life. Even if you have actually been a complete disaster as a host – which is impossible – I would still be proud and wherever I am, I am smiling and thinking of you._
> 
> _First, the essentials, in case someone tries to take this letter from you:_
> 
> -          _You have no restrictions on your movements and may visit any part of Night Vale or leave Night Vale for any reason as long as you return for the show._
> 
> -          _You may broadcast from outside the station if you are able to do so. You may not broadcast from outside Night Vale._
> 
> -          _You may use the Voice as you chose, on the radio and off, though you should respect a certain moral code of conduct._
> 
> -          _You are no longer eligible for reeducation at City Hall or wherever the Secret Police choose to operate._
> 
> -          _You can not be arrested or detained for an period of time that will delay or interrupt the broadcast._
> 
> -          _No one can deny you access to any information that pertains to the show, including all areas of Night Vale history, though you may be subject to city penalties if you abuse this right._
> 
> -          _The Sheriff and his police force have no jurisdiction over anything that occurs in the station except when it regards visitors and interns._
> 
> -          _The entire station has surveillance immunity, and you can request temporary immunity in another location if it pertains to the broadcast, though it may be denied._
> 
> _You have probably already begun to grasp what kind of freedom this grants you, above almost all other citizens. If you read the enclosed envelope, where I will disclose the events leading up to your departure for Europe that have been hidden from you, you will probably have some understanding as to why the Sheriff was so against giving you these powers. But he did not pick you. I did not pick you. Night Vale picked you, and no one can tell you otherwise._
> 
> _When I died, presumably when the stars were right, you traveled with me past the First Gate and many things were made known to you as they were to me when Randolph died. Some of these things you did not bring back with you so you could function as a human being. Others required time to gestate inside of you. As a wise scholar once said, “In time comes wisdom, and in the length of days, understanding.”_
> 
> _If you are ready, please proceed next to the book, and then to the envelope._

            ****************************************

When Carlos finally willed himself to check on Cecil, who had been silent for so long, he found him with the small book open in front of him. Its binding was loosened by time and many, many readings and it was actually more of a notebook, with passages copied from other books and taped in between paragraphs of handwritten notes. Cecil was already adding his own with one of Carlos’s pencils, mostly in the margins.

“It’s a book of Night Vale lore,” Cecil explained. “Randolph started it in the twenties, when he founded the station. I don’t understand a lot of it,” he confessed. “But it explains how the broadcast works. I just can’t ... I can’t put it into words even though I’m reading it in words.”

“Okay.” Carlos understood what was meant for him and what was meant exclusively for Cecil, at least for the time being.

“It says to fully control the station, I have to open my blocked charkas,” Cecil said. “I have to open every facet of myself.” He glanced at the envelope. “Al wants me to know what is blocked.”

“Will you actually be able to remember it?”

“It depends. That part gets a little technical.” And there were things he didn’t want to say. The book was open to a page with charts and graphics Carlos didn’t understand, and notes in languages he had never seen before. If Cecil wasn’t eager to share that was ... fair, actually. These were secrets passed down from radio host to radio host, Voice to Voice. Carlos wasn’t in that chain of transmission. Instead he looked at the remaining envelope, and Cecil noticed him doing so.

“I have to, don’t I?” Cecil asked, even though it really wasn’t a question.

“No one can make you do anything.”

“I’m the Voice of Night Vale. I have responsibilities.” And Cecil did, despite his offhanded way of speaking about the permanency of his job on the show itself, take it very seriously. “I need to read this alone.”

“Okay.” This was not something Carlos could or would fight him on. He just would be there for the fallout.

            ****************************************

> _Cecil,_
> 
> _This letter is an attempt to reconstruct events sometime between your time at the Night Vale Daily Journal and your trip to Europe. It is a result of both the Sheriff’s investigations, to which I was given complete access, and my own theories and conversations with people before they were reeducated. I can’t tell you the exact date that trouble started, because the only people who knew were you and Dean Curwen, and Dean Curwen is dead. The SSP decided to pay it safe and remove all of your memories from your time at the Journal, as well as any memories of Curwen as they did with the entire town._
> 
> _Working at the Journal was not a particularly happy part of your life. It was what you said you wanted to do, and it since it was one of the two outlets for journalists in town, I wasn’t surprised. There were certainly points where you were happy with your work and how your life had turned out, but you were fundamentally unsatisfied, something I recognized better than you. Obviously I knew you were going to be the Voice of Night Vale, but the stars were not right, and you were really only killing time until then, but I couldn’t tell you that for reasons that I literally just told you before I sat down to write this. Someone with your drive might have left Night Vale for a time, or permanently, after finding it such a small world, but you were not going to. Our relationship was a little strained at the time as a result of all this tension. Childhood is so regimented to ensure survival; I never thought the town gave anyone much to do after they graduated college. So I didn’t see as much of you as I would have liked._
> 
> _Your best friend at the time was Dean. You had not always been friends, but you were the same age and teachers sealed you next to each other when he was the first “C” and you were last “B” in the room. His family had a long history in Night Vale and might have been a bit prejudiced against “outsiders” and their children. You seemed to like him more in college, when his parents died and he became more independent. He also worked for the press, mostly in the audio/visual department and on contract. He did a good deal of recording for the station to play on off hours. I do not remember him as being particularly nice, but I also do not remember him as a particularly mean or ill-spirited soul._
> 
> _You once asked me if people could change who they were. Specifically, you asked me three days ago when you left John’s farm. I said no to you, but the truth is they can be corrupted by outside forces. The occasion is generally very rare, and they had to be ambitious and power-seeking to get themselves involved in something that would do that in the first place, but it did happen to Dean._
> 
> _At some point, the two you got a hold of a book. You did not know it but it was the Necronomicon, the most evil and forbidden of books, and the two of you started reading it. You found a way to avoid the SSP and eventually even my watch or it would have been seized immediately, though I know not for what purpose._
> 
> _I can only point now to the first time you came to me for help. Unfortunately it was long before I realized how deep the problem went._
> 
> _I wish it had been otherwise._


	4. Consent

Chapter 4

1995

Al noticed Cecil’s approach without seeing it. He was on his knees in the garden, trying to coax a little more out of the soul so his penstemons wouldn’t be totally parched with the little water he could afford to offer his garden. He could hear Cecil long before he could see him, not because Cecil was a noisy person but because Al could feel the vibrations in the earth. “Hold on.” He poured the last of the water directly into the roots and began the long process of trying to pat the dirt out of his fur. When he turned around it was with a bit more alarm. Cecil looked smaller, and like he had lost weight, and at least one of those things was based on his mood and confident. He also hadn’t shaved in a day, very unusual for Cecil.

“Hi.” Cecil fidgeted. “Can we talk?”

He probably meant inside, as Al’s house was free of listening devices. “Of course.” Al was still a little dirty for his own tastes, but he couldn’t claim his house was dust-free either, nor would he shake himself out like a dog (he actually didn’t know how to do that). “Would you like tea?”

“Sure.” Cecil sounded like he would have said yes to anything. He also sounded like he was as eager to talk as he was to bolt from the building and hide. Like it had taken all of his courage to come here. “Thank you.”

Al was quiet, but not in a very intimidating way. He knew how to ease answers out of someone, especially someone so willing to give them. He sat down across from Cecil at the table and waited.

“So, um, can I tell the whole story with no judgments? You can do that, I know you’ll want to do that, but just wait until the end, okay? The very end. Because I want to do this right and I don’t know how to do it.”

Al’s mind ran in a flurry to his knowledge of events in the recent days and found nothing out of the ordinary, even of things he wasn’t allowed to know about or report. “Fine.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

Cecil sighed. If he could have stuttered as he sighed, he probably would have. He stared off at nowhere in particular, somewhere on the wall behind Al as if it had become a fascinating object. Anywhere but Al. “So this thing happened. At a party on Saturday. I don’t know what to do about it.”

Al would have corrected him, as he was using two different tenses and should have said ‘what can be done now’ but he held his tongue. It was Tuesday, so whatever was bothering Cecil was still _reall_ y bothering him.

“It was at um – I think Brent’s house. It doesn’t really matter,” Cecil went on with no coaxing. “I was drinking.”

Al wondered, _What else do you do at a party?_ Or maybe _Do you expect me to be surprised about this? You spent so much time drunk in college you vomited on my desk_.

“I was drinking and Stephanie was drinking. You know Stephanie? She wanted to be called Stephie in elementary school. Or she didn’t and we did anyway. I don’t remember.”

Al nodded, because he knew everyone in Night Vale.

“G-d. Anyway, um, we were both pretty drunk. Maybe high? Dean had reefers but they weren’t very good. You could tell because he wasn’t smoking them – Anyway, _again_ , so um, things didn’t go well between us.”

After the silence Al said, “I’m going to need a little more clarification.”

“I mean, we had sex. I’m sure of it.” He ran his hands through his hair, which just served to mess it up more. “Dean said, ‘Have you ever been with a woman?’ or something like that and I was like no, duh, of course not and Stephie thought it was hilarious.”

And he dropped again. He was now staring at some spot in the table in front of him. So Al offered, “So you had sex.”

“I don’t know – I’m very sure we had it.”

“Just you and Stephanie?”

“Dean was there but he wasn’t involved. He was in the room. I’m making it sound creepier than it is, right? But it wasn’t very creepy. It was all very mellow. I think because we were really drunk.”

Was Cecil just freaking out about his sexuality? That _would_ be a first. Al had never told Cecil what life was like outside of Night Vale in this respect, but peer pressure was still peer pressure.

“And, um.” He scratched his head furiously, more like he wanted to hurt himself than kill an itch. “I don’t know if it was consensual. I don’t remember.”

Cecil looked like he wanted to sink into the earth right then and there, but Al was just confused. “Consensual for whom?”

Cecil’s eyes went wide. “Um, well, Stephanie, I guess. I mean, I know. I don’t remember everything she said to me. She said a lot of things but it all got drowned out by chanting, but I think she said no. At some point.” He was visibly searching for details; you could see it in his eyes. “I hurt her. I know I did because I went on Sunday, to apologize, and she had bruises. And some Band-aids. I must have scratched her, or she scratched against the wood floor or something.”

“What did she say?”

“I don’t know! I told you I don’t know!” Cecil pleaded.

“I meant on Sunday,” Al carefully clarified.

“Oh. Um, she wasn’t sure what happened, either. That’s what she said. I don’t know if she was lying. She said it was a wild night but she wasn’t smiling, like a real wild night, you know? She looked tired. And I asked if she had been to the hospital and she didn’t answer me. So I told her, um, if she wanted to report assault, or whatever, I wouldn’t contest it.” He closed his eyes because he was holding back tears. “She said she just wanted to forget about it. She told me to stay away from her. I want to make this right – I don’t even know what I did for sure, but I want to make this right.”

But there would be none of that. Some things couldn’t be undone. “What did Dean say?”

“What do you mean?”

"Have you spoken to Dean since the party?”

“Of course.” It sounded like it hadn’t even occurred to him to mention it. “He just said it was a wild party.”

“But you said he was in the room with the two of you. The whole time.”

“Well, yeah, he was chanting.” His eyes opened. “Oh, that’s right. I forgot about that. The chanting. He said he wasn’t going to do it, but I guess he was drunk too, so he did. To get me in the mood.”

“Back up. What are you talking about? What chant?” All chants of a sexual nature were strictly forbidden to be taught or learned in Night Vale, and they were generally (Al had heard) ineffective.

“Oh. Um, Dean found this chant. In a book.”

“What book?”

Cecil grew hesitant at Al’s insistence. “I don’t know what book. Just a book we found. It doesn’t have a name. But that one section it gets me – it makes me think I want to do things. I don’t think I really want to do them, but it’s different at the time.”

“Did you talk to him about it?”

“...Why would I do that?”

Al put his elbows down on the table. If Cecil knew the truth Al could use the Voice on him, though Cecil always seemed to know when he was doing that, and Cecil clearly did not have a full knowledge of the events of that night. “Let’s go over it again. You went to a party. Dean was there and Stephanie was there.”

“I went with Dean. N-Not as a date. Just kind of, with Dean, because he said, let’s go to this party, and we did.”

“You were all drinking, maybe smoking. Dean was selling weed.”

“Sometimes it’s hash but yet. Except Dean – I didn’t actually see him drink.”

“And you got into a conversation with Stephanie.”

“Yes.”

“Were you flirting with her or were you just talking?”

“I think I was just talking. You know how people talk at parties.”

“But you weren’t interested her. You’ve never been interested in her before.”

Cecil shrugged. “No. I guess not.”

“And Dean asked you if you were interested, and you said no.”

“Right.”

“Then what happened?”

Cecil blushed. “It’s kind of embarrassing. I mean, terrible, but still. It’s hard to – “

“When did Dean start chanting? Before or after you were doing anything other than talking with Stephanie?”

“Uhhh ... before. I think. I don’t know. Probably before?”

“And what happened after that?”

Cecil shrunk further into his chair. If he wasn’t Cecil, it wouldn’t have been possible. He probably measured five feet at this point. “I told you what happened after that. Please.”

“Okay. What did you _feel_ after that?”

“I felt – Oh G-d, I was horrible. I felt horrible things. I felt like I wanted ... well, you know. I was so hungry and she was so small and so ... breakable. Holy shit, I think I remember hearing a bone crack. She did scream. She might not have said no but I couldn’t hear her anymore. Her words didn’t make sense to me. It was like I was speaking another language that I don’t know and she wasn’t speaking it and _Christ_ , I think she was trying to get away. She was crying so much – “ Which was when, appropriately, Cecil broke down, crying into his hands. Al didn’t try to stop the sobbing. Cecil needed the release. _He_ was the one hurting now. Al moved around the table and put a hand on Cecil’s shoulder and for the first minute Cecil didn’t even notice it.

“Just tell me what to do!” Cecil cried out. “Just tell me how to make it right!”

“Some things can’t be made right,” Al said. Cecil had come far enough for an honest answer. “You know that.”

“I don’t want it to be true.”

There were elements missing from the story. Al had suspicions, but nothing he could prove. He did know – or he was now just fairly sure – that the tremendous guilt Cecil was feeling was _survivor’s guilt_ , and also that Cecil wouldn’t be able to understand that now, even if he was told. He had been reckless and stupid but whatever happened, it was way above Cecil, on a whole different plane of evil.

“Cecil, I can’t make this go away,” Al said. “But I can give you some advice. It’s up to you to take it.”

Cecil wiped his eyes and looked up, almost feverish with attention.

“Give Stephanie her space. Whatever happened to her, she’s chosen to figure it out without you. That’s her decision and you have to respect it.”

He nodded.

“Second,” Al said, mustering his Voice so it appeared only on the edges, where Cecil might not notice. “Stay away from Dean Curwen.”

            ****************************************

Cecil was reluctant at first because he had a good heart, and believed the best in people he shouldn’t put his trust in, but Al didn’t let him leave until he’d promised to make a clean break. With that taken care of, Al’s next stop was the trailer park where Stephanie lived with her parents. College classes were cancelled until the teachers reemerged from a portal they had all disappeared into after someone marked it with a sign that said “tenure.” He probably had never spoken two words to her in his life, but se recognized him from afar both because he was the Voice of Night Vale and because he was very noticeable, especially when one of his horns snagged on a clothing line and almost took down a let of sheets.

“Sorry,” he said as she helped untangle him before any real damage can be done. “They just keep growing,” he explained, pointing to his horns. “I don’t really check them often enough.”

“That’s all right.” The entrance at least put her slightly more at east. She still looked tense and pale, like Cecil had. Her pallor resembled someone who had something important drained from them. “So, you’re here because ...?”

“I know everything that goes on in Night Vale.” It was a slight exaggeration, of course.

“Cecil told you.”

He wanted to give her credit for calling him on it, but he wouldn’t implicate Cecil further than necessary. “I just want to know what happened. That is, if you want to share.”

“I don’t really want to, but I feel like I should.” She looked around nervously before inviting him into the trailer. Of course, he didn’t really fit inside. Stupid management contract! “I told Cecil I don’t remember what happened. I wasn’t lying.”

“But you did go to the hospital,” he said. It was not an accusation. He made sure it sounded like the very opposite of that.

“Everything hurt and I knew I should get X-rays. And they had the morning after pill.” Unlike Cecil, she was not exactly racing to give him information, but he gave her time. Moments like these were helped along by his appearance as a giant stuffed animal. “But it’s just, um, a lot of bruises. I tried to tell him it was okay but he didn’t really believe me.”

Because it wasn’t really okay. Al nodded. “I’m sure that Cecil was honest with you about his feelings.”

“I don’t want to make him feel bad but ... I have enough to deal with, you know?”

Al did not know, actually. He had to imagine it for himself. “I need to know about Dean.”

“What, that that creeper fucker stood there the whole time and watched and didn’t jack off or anything? Not that I wanted him to, but what was he doing there?”

“I was told he was chanting. Did you recognize it?”

“No, and my dad’s the president of the chanting association,” she said. “It sounded like ... he could barely make the words with his mouth. Like he needed another mouth to properly do it. Or just a different kind of mouth. I know that’s not helpful, but ...” She looked at her hands. “Dean and Cecil had this weird vibe when they came into the party. Like they had some secret that it made it seem like they were together, but they weren’t. Dean said he was there to sell some buds, but they weren’t any good.”

“Was he drinking?”

“I don’t think so. Cecil was. He gets so nervous at parties sometimes. I don’t know why. Maybe because he was uncool as a kid? So I guess that was why he was drinking a lot.” She lowered her voice. “He really is – I guess was – a sweet guy. Everybody knows that. He doesn’t turn into an angry drunk or a mean drunk. I was talking to him because I wanted to. And because he always knows all this town gossip since he works at the Journal. I wasn’t expecting anything.”

“Did anything happen before Dean’s chanting?”

“...No. But sex chants are super illegal! And they never work. Or so I’ve been told.”

Al took a deep breath. A picture was beginning to form, but he would need reliable witnesses, and it sounded like he wasn’t going to get any. “I can’t tell you what happened, but I’m going to get to the bottom of it.”

Stephanie shrugged. “I just want to forget. But I don’t want to drink to do it. You understand?”

“Yes,” he replied. “I very much understand.”

            ****************************************

Dean was easy to find. He was a contract worker, so he was often at home. He wasn’t even out of his pajamas, nor did he look very surprised. “I thought so. Cecil _is_ your bitch.”

“You’re lucky I’m not the police.”

“And you won’t call them, because you don’t have any proof and the whole thing would implicate Cecil more than me,” Dean said with stunning accuracy. “Whatever he told you, I was not physically part of whatever happened Saturday night. If Cecil thinks he raped her, I can’t change his mind. I’ve already tried, actually, because he’s my friend, and it didn’t work. So now you want to put all the blame on me to make him feel better?”

“I need to know about the chant.”

“And I thought the Voice of Night Vale knew everything?” Dean said, sipping his coffee. “I’m not sure what happened last night. I was high as fuck. I don’t have to answer any questions, and if you pull that Voice of Night Vale thing on me I will sue your ass for improper use of the Voice and _win_. I have relatives on the City Council and you have _nobody_. You’re barely from Night Vale.”

Al tried not to let his fury get up at the obvious taunts, but some things went deep in him. He sighed and realized this was a _kid_ talking to him, even if he was in an adult body. And he did have a point. Al couldn’t make accusations without proof. The Curwen name carried weight.

“This isn’t over,” he said.

“Uh, sure.” Dean rolled his eyes. “Whatever, big guy.”

Al turned away. He knew that for Dean’s lackadaisical attitude, he watching every movement Al made.

            ****************************************

2013

> _I would have gone further then if I could have. I did try to research the story of chants that did what was described with me, but came up with nothing but the Sheriff personally asking me questions about it._
> 
> _You did stay away from Dean, and I thought that was enough. Why did I have to be so wrong?_

 

Carlos set the letter down. It was all Cecil had given him. There was more, but it was all Cecil wanted to read today, and all he wanted Carlos to see as he silently passed it across the table, then retreated into his bedroom. Carlos was about to go after him when Cecil emerged with a dusty cardboard box that he set down before them. He did not say what he was looking for. He did not speak a word.

“Cecil – “ was all Carlos got in before he realized this wasn’t the time to speak. Cecil had totally withdrawn into himself and his task, which appeared to be sorting through old books and papers.

“Ah.” He lifted out a thick leather tome. Of course Night Vale yearbooks would look like forbidden magic books. “They banned these a few years after I graduated.”

Cecil needed this. He needed to flip through the glossy pages of group photos and introductions from the principal (who was, for whatever reason, a trapper keeper) to the pictures of the graduating class. There weren’t many, Night Vale survival rates being low.

But there he was. Dean Curwen. He was probably mixed race, at least partially white, and his hair was a very dark brown. His smile was very easy and natural, as if things were going well for him, and he had confidence about the future. Now he was dead, but he _had_ been real.

“I don’t remember anything about him.” Cecil’s voice was weak. He was stuffed full of emotions and for once he didn’t want to over-share. “I didn’t know he existed until half an hour ago.” His eyes finally strayed to Carlos. “This is what is bothering Station Management. The book we found.”

“We can’t talk about it except in my special lab but yes. It’s interfering with the station. We don’t know how or why. I don’t know what to do about it.”

Cecil looked at his watch. Carlos’s watch. “I have to get ready for the show. I have to try to get the tower working.”

“Do you want to – “

“No.” He did not want to talk about it. “Not never, just ... not now. Please.”

Of course Carlos obliged him. “Whenever you want, okay?” He tried to subtly reach for Cecil, to squeeze his arm or pat his shoulder or anything to create a physical connection between them, but Cecil’s body didn’t seem to be there to find even though he was standing right in front of him. He was unconsciously contorting his body to avoid being touched. Carlos could take a hint, and smiled at him. “I love you. Whatever happens or did happen, I will always love you. So don’t get hurt tonight.”

Cecil expanded with relief. “I’ll try.”

            ****************************************

As he drove to work Cecil tried to think about the small book on the seat beside him, the one about the radio station, and nothing else. The facts Al had given him were too bright like the sun, and he couldn’t look directly into them. He didn’t want to look directly into himself. He didn’t want to begin to process what Al was telling him as to what he had been. There was relief in the fact that he had a show to do, and nothing could stop that. These familiar rhythms put him at ease as he swiped his card and unlocked the station doors.

There were no interns. They were all dead or missing, and the usual process through which Station Management sent out a call for new ones hadn’t happened on its own. He turned all the lights on himself, something he hadn’t done in a long time, and brewed his own cup of coffee. The fax machine was loaded with notes for today’s announcements and his phone was filled with texts. His email wasn’t much better, and he sat down in his office to tackle them first before trying to figure out the metaphysics of the radio tower. Worse comes to worse, he could just do the show without it reaching anyone again. Or call Carlos and have him come, so he would have an audience. The show would go on.

He wasn’t all that surprised when Deputy Sheriff Mitchell showed up. Of course they would send him. They liked each other. The Sheriff knew that. Cecil would pretend that Mitchell was being honest with him even when he wasn’t. Mitchell would return the favor by being as considerate as possible.

Mitchell removed his hat and balaclava as he entered the office. “I won’t take up much of your time. I imagine you know why I’m here?”

"I don’t know why the tower isn’t working properly,” Cecil said matter-of-factly. “Management hasn’t been forthcoming about what’s bothering them. I did the show last night, even if it didn’t come through. I’m going to try to repair it, but I don’t know how long that will take.” He glanced at his notes, trying to look business-like, as if a thousand different thoughts weren’t flying through his head and part of him still wanted to curl up under his desk and cry about something he had no memory of. He was doing his job; he was a professional. He could keep that façade up for a long time. “Is there anything else you need from me?”

“I got a report that there was some unusual chatter from your apartment today.” To his credit, Mitchell did not pull out the actual form that was probably stuffed in a compartment hanging off his belt. “Vague words, discussion of past events, that sort of thing.”

Cecil understand why Al had said what he had said at the very beginning of the notice. “That reminds me. I’d like to request a temporary lift on surveillance in my apartment.”

“What?”

“There’s probably a form for it,” Cecil said. “I just don’t have it.”

“Cecil, that’s not something you can request.”

“I’m not requesting it. The Voice of Night Vale is requesting it. And I do have certain privileges if it concerns the broadcast, which the situation currently does. Algonquin had them and I’ve inherited them. So I’m requesting it and the Sheriff should have no reason not to grant it. I can type something up if you’d like.”

“Are you serious?”

Cecil typed up a very quick note and sent it to the printer. All it needed after that was the station stamp and his bloody fingerprint to be a legal document. “If he does actually shoot the messenger, just give it to an underling. Now if you don’t mind, I have to get ready for the show.”

Dumbfounded, Mitchell took the letter. “Is it going to play tonight?”

Cecil shrugged. “We’ll see.”


	5. Forgive and Drink to Forget

Chapter 5

It was not a permanent solution, but it worked. Carlos was in his car when the radio came on. “We are not who we say we are. We are not who we think we are. We may not even be anything at all. Welcome to Night Vale.”

The radio sounded like it was between stations, picking up a lot of static in the background. It had to be turned all the way up to be properly heard. When he arrived at the station, Cecil was in the booth, a bloody apron hanging from the back of his chair. Carlos waved but did not interrupt. He suspected he was the only one who could hear the full broadcast.

Cecil said he felt bad about giving Carlos intern work, but they both had to clean up the break room or nobody was going home tonight. The air smelled heavily of burned meat and incense that made Carlos sneeze. Blood and entrails were everywhere.

“I may have over-sacrificed,” Cecil admitted on the way home, “but it did strengthen the signal.”

“How do bloodstone circles work?” Carlos had seen all kinds of them – placed in an altar, around an altar, outside, inside, and once, in a shower. All he really knew was that he was an Outsider and not allowed to purchase bloodstones or bloodstone accessories. “You have your personal set and there’s the station set. So I’m figuring they’re person-based or location-based.”

“Right. You’re so intuitive, Carlos.” But Cecil was too tired to really put the weight into the compliment. “Bloodstones are just a kind of battery pack. When you get a new set, they don’t mean anything to anyone. When you start using them as conduits for spirits and energy, you leave a signature.”

“Can you change the signature?”

“It’s not a good idea. It’s better to start fresh. Most people are buried with their bloodstones. Kids get a starter set that is specifically designed to burn out in a few years. I got mine when I was eight. I was _so_ excited.” His eyes drifted aimlessly to the roof of the car. “You have to be sixteen to get a real set. The more you use them, the more they’re attuned to you. The public sets, like the one in the station, are designed to only work in once place and bond with the place instead of the person. If you remove them, they lose their power quickly. It’s actually illegal to move or alter public sets, like the one in Grove Park.”

“Can you share a set with someone?” Carlos had touched maybe literally every part of Cecil’s body, but he’d never dared to touch his bloodstones unless they were already in a case. And he hadn’t been told this, either. It was something he sensed from the moment he step foot in Cecil’s apartment.

“You shouldn’t. It’s one of the first things we learned in the bloodstone safety course. If you start chanting or casting with another person things get ... mixed up. The results won’t always be what you want, and in extreme cases, the people themselves can get mixed. They’re touching each other’s personalities in the stones and making use of them.” He looked over at Carlos. “Some married couples get permits to do it. There’s a _lot_ of paperwork for it though.”

For something magical, at least it followed a set of rules. Very few things did in Night Vale. “What if you mix up sets?”

“Why would you do that?”

“I mean, if two people put their sets together. Like they made one giant circle with both sets of stones.”

Cecil’s eyes went wide. “That would be very bad. Unless you knew what you were doing ... and then it would still be very bad. I was told it’s like surgically grafting yourself to another person. Or them to you. You don’t want to be bound to another person. You get too connected,” he said. “I wish I could go into more detail, but that’s really all they told me in bloodstone ed class. I can get you a safety pamphlet from city hall, if you’d like.”

“That would be great.” Carlos pulled into the parking lot. “I’m just curious. A scientist is always curious.”

Cecil smiled. He didn’t have much to say over dinner, but he left the materials from Algonquin untouched and Carlos did not inquire further, his mind wandering to his own research. The only thing outwardly different about Cecil that night was that he didn’t want to be touched. He curled up as far as he could on his side of the bed without being rude about it.

It was easy to give Cecil his space at night, but harder in the early morning when Carlos woke to find the sheets gone, having twisted all around his boyfriend as he tossed and turned in the night, and it looked like he had sweated through most of them. He was still fitfully asleep, yet when Carlos so much as touched his shoulder he lurched sideways and _away_. Carlos dozed and when he woke again he found the sheets abandoned on the floor and heard the shower running.

Carlos pulled him in this time and kissed him. Cecil could only put up so much resistance to that. “You looked like you were having a nightmare.”

“There’s nothing to have; I don’t remember anything.” Cecil sat down on the bed, the towel covering him from the waist down, his newly-blown hair an adorable mess. “I believe Al that all of those things happened, but I feel the most guilty about not connecting to any of it. I can’t even imagine the person who could have done those things.”

“Then I guess the Secret Police did a good job,” Carlos said. “Is there any chance – does anyone ever - ?”

“Remember? I don’t know. If they do they’ve been smart enough to pretend that they haven’t.” He looked Carlos in the eyes. “I don’t want to remember. I know I should but – “

“You don’t have to.”

“That’s the problem,” Cecil said. “I think I do.”

            ****************************************

The next logical step for Carlos would be to return to the site and take more samples. Carlos repeated this mantra in his head while still in his car, parked far enough down the road that he could barely see the house. He’d made it in and out once, right? How hard could it be?

_You need to do this. For science._

_For Night Vale._

_For Cecil._

But the hour passed and found him shutting off the car so he didn’t run the battery down. It also turned off the air conditioner, the heat made him nod off shortly after he remembered to roll down the window.

A knock on the other window shattered his temporary peace. “Wuh – I’m not using a pencil!” He sat up and shuddered again as he saw Isaac’s mischievous face in the window. “Crap, you scared me! I bet you meant to do that.” He sighed. “Just come on in I guess.”

“I’m not staying in a hot car in the desert!” Isaac said as he climbed in. “Let’s go to a bar. On me.”

“We’re probably dehydrated.”

“Then you can order water. And tell me all about your secret project.”

“How did you know it’s secret? Wait, stupid question.” But he did drive to the nearest bar, which had just opened for the afternoon. Cecil told him before he knew what it was about. “You know, the very fact that it’s secret means that I can’t talk about it.”

Isaac ordered a beer and held up a pamphlet from the car. “‘Bloodstones and you.’ You know they won’t let me buy one of these?”

“Me neither.” It did feel really good to drink. He was parched, and he his head hurt, maybe from being in the proximity of the house for so long. “Of course with me they’re not worried that I’ll try to end the world.”

“One time! I did that one time!”

“That we know of,” Carlos replied. He did have time to embrace the irony that he needed information on the Necronomicon and he was probably sitting across from a world-class expert. “You didn’t have bloodstones in Canada?”

“We didn’t have them anywhere. Just altars. I can’t believe I was missing so important an ingredient.”

Carlos swallowed some ice by accident and felt it slide all the way down his throat. He coughed. “Isaac,” he said between gasps. “What do you know about altars?”

            ****************************************

Carlos drove home from Isaac’s place in the dark, his backseat loaded with equipment and books. It would be a start. He turned on the radio but could barely make out Cecil’s voice. It was the only station, but Cecil’s usual dulcet tones were interrupted by static and an unidentifiable groaning. The signal was definitely weaker than the night before.

Cecil came in the door to the apartment an hour later with bloodstains and some kind of goo all over his neat work shirt, which he stripped off and dumped in the special hamper. He fell into the couch, ignoring the lesser stains that had soaked through to his undershirt, and leaned on Carlos’s shoulder.

“How’d it go?” Even though that was obvious.

“I talked to Station Management,” Cecil said, switching the channel to Animal Planet but not taking the television off mute. “I tried to talk to them, anyway. But there were no envelopes. Just a lot of moaning and spitting. They usually don’t spit.” He buried his face in the crook of Carlos’s neck. “I don’t know how to fix the station, and I don’t think they know, either. They’re all riled up.”

“It’s probably just interference from the house,” Carlos replied as he ran a hand through Cecil’s soft downy hair. “Or from what’s in the house.”

“You still haven’t told me that.”

“Told you what?”

“What’s in the house. ... Dean’s house, right?”

“Yes.”  He realized Cecil was right; he’d avoided the subject. “Did you get that surveillance approval from the police?”

“Yes.”

“There’s nothing in the house, but in the basement, there’s an altar. With two sets of bloodstones. And the book. That’s why I ran out and I haven’t been back. I’m afraid. I get too worked up just sitting in the driveway.”

Cecil stretched out, possibly in several different ways, but picked his head up. “That’s why you were asking me about bloodstones.”

“Yes.”

“One of them must be Dean’s ... and the other must be mine’s.”

“Not necessarily.”

“I got a new set when I came home from Europe,” Cecil said, eyeing his own altar suspiciously. “When I went through reeducation, they just said I had to buy new stones, and that was that. I didn’t even think too much about it. Thinking too much defeats the point of reeducation and you end up there longer.”

“There are other possibilities,” Carlos suggested. “We still don’t _really_ know what happened there.” He changed topics. “I spent the afternoon with your brother. He taught me how to construct an altar. Not the Night Vale way, but there are some obvious similarities. Have you said anything to him since I saw the mayor?”

Cecil shook his head. “I mentioned it before that. The book – is this the book Isaac tried to steal from Russia?”

“Yeah.”

His boyfriend let his eyes wander to the TV set. “He probably could really help. If it comes to that.”

“It had better not. No offense to Isaac but – “

“Yes, yes, he tried to clear off the planet,” Cecil said with a flourish. “Carlos, that was so long ago.”

“It was two months ago!”

Cecil kissed him on the cheek. “Forgive and drink to forget.”

A drink did sound nice. Carlos didn’t have any in the actual bar, so they opened a bottle of wine and finished it over dinner. They silently agreed not to tackle any more of Al’s letters tonight.

“I was thinking,” Cecil said. “You know, if you want, you could, um, touch one of my bloodstones. For science.”

“Cecil I don’t need – “ But he stopped himself when he recognized the tone in Cecil’s voice, particularly around the words ‘for science.’ “Do you want me to?”

“I’m ... a little curious.”

The bloodstones were on the small stone altar in Cecil’s bedroom. Sometimes he took them outside to chant in the very early morning, but he always re-arranged them in the exact same positions when he came back in. They hummed dimly when he chanted, something Carlos never gave much thought to early in their relationship because it frightened him, and not later because he was used to it. Now dressed in his pajamas, he approached the altar carefully, wondering if they would be smooth or sharp to the touch. Hot or cold? Would they radiate light and heat? Did they get excited?

“They’re not going to explode,” Cecil said, perhaps a little impatiently. “They’re just rocks.”

But they were clearly not just rocks. The air around them was different, now that Carlos was standing so close and paying attention. There was an extra gust in the air just above that little circle no wider than a foot.

Carlos took a deep breath and let his fingers gently tap the closest one to him. It did make a sound, not out loud but internally. The stone felt softer than it should have, even with the polished surface that was surprisingly cool to the touch. Since Cecil wasn’t stopping him, he let three of his fingers down on the stone and held them there, letting a thumb creep into the side. He could hear Cecil gasp, and then again, and he realized he was hearing an echo of the gasp in the stone. Carlos closed his eyes and pictured himself in Cecil’s position on the edge of the bed, looking at Carlos, and he felt the jittery anticipation in his boyfriend. Christ, he _felt_ it.

It was like he was touching Cecil somewhere that had never been touched by anyone. After just a few seconds it was too much, too invasive, and he pulled back and looked at Cecil, who was smiling dreamily. “You should probably, um – “

“Stop?”

“Kiss me.”

Cecil wasn’t aroused – not yet anyway – but he was so close to Carlos, as if no distance was between them at all, not several feet, and they were wearing the same skin and had only been temporarily pulled part. Carlos made a note to never, EVER touch anyone else’s bloodstones and pulled Cecil in close. Cecil wanted him close and tight, and Carlos could not think of a better thing to do than obey.


	6. The Dream House

Chapter 6

1995

In time, Cecil decided that Al’s advice was good. He made a clean break, leaving a message on Dean’s answering machine that he needed distance and was vague about how long he needed it for. He stayed away from Stephanie, which involved staying away from parties in general, and he drank only to forget. He was drunk a lot of the time.

But that too would pass. Without spending every hour at Dean’s house, his schedule opened up considerably. He didn’t have a lot to do outside of work, but he could take his time with the errands he did have. He saw Earl and even talked to him about the stress of being assistant scoutmaster. He met Al for lunch on Sundays at the diner. He wrote a little and did some investigative reporting outside of work, the kind he’d been hired for instincts for. He went to re-education at least twice over a span of six months – he was pretty sure about it – but not for reasons he could remember, of course. He was left to imagine what cool projects he must have been up to to earn _that_. He was on time at work and his superiors liked having their reliable copy-editor back. He wanted to make lead reporter, but he had to find a way to do it without ending up in re-education or just murdering the current lead reporter as she had done to get her current desk. It was a very nice desk. She said she had access to the internet even if all the content was blocked, though Cecil still wasn’t totally sure what the internet was. He knew everyone wanted it, and that was good enough for him.

This calm (if slightly boring) period in Cecil’s life lasted a good six months. He didn’t notice the change at first, and might not have noticed at all if he didn’t keep a dream journal. It was a silly habit, started in a creative writing class when he had dreams of being a novelist or a poet. It wasn’t as if he ever looked back at a single entry over the years, but he still had the journal.

He couldn’t put words to his dreams anymore. He would wake knowing that they must have been intense because he was still filled with wonder and other, more indescribable emotions. He wrote quickly, still in bed and trying to write down as many descriptive words as possibly before the rest slid from his memory. It ultimately left him in a state of excitement followed by a slowly-building stupor.

Until the next night. The next night he saw stars, but not of the galaxy above him. He saw what he thought was the moon (it was very small, and red, and only told lies) and the planets that were also said to exist and the pointy edges of stars like the ones drawn on a children’s crayon drawing. He reached for the limit of space, ready to touch the edge of time and feel its cool breeze and hard surface when he woke and touched the alarm clock instead before hurling it across the room.

He became an adventurer. Someone who left Night Vale in the permissible way, only at night and for beyond the watch of the policeman wearing black camouflage in his station on the fire escape. He’d never felt an urge to leave, really – not the way out by the Route 800, the way jerks like Steve Carlsberg left and hopefully never came back, even though they always did. This is different. He was free to explore with no boundaries. He traveled to dark lands with darker creatures who spoke to him in dark tongues; he traveled to light lands with blinding white creatures that spoke in more dreadful tongues of gold. He got lost in the void of space but was forever reminded by a voice that he will find his way home, always, because his home is Night Vale, and he will come when called.

The voice was maternal or fraternal – Cecil can’t make out the difference. It ran its hands through his hair and told him was a good boy, not like the mean kids or the wimpy kids at school. He was perfect just as he is. He had beautiful eyes and hair and tentacles. Yes, he had tentacles. Not the defensive ones he’s grown in the past, which are translucent and slippery and dry up quickly. These were matching the color of his own skin. They were a part of him and he was a part of them and they were both part of a larger whole that is _Father_.

When he woke his hand was still shaking and writes down the main thing he remembered – _Father_. It wasn’t the voice he heard, but it was there. So far away, so imperceptible, but for a moment he perceived it. The fact that the moment was gone frustrated him to no end and he slid into a depression. He got no work done that day. He stared at the clock, wishing away the hours and for the bliss of sleep.

The dream didn’t come to him that night, but it did the next, and after that. He got further, closer, shouting his father’s name, being in his presence, seeing all that came before him and would come after him – his kin, his real kin, no more ex-foster parents. He heard the flute playing while a idiot, blind god laughed.

The nights filled him with joy and energy and the days filled him with malaise. He thought about telling Al about his dreams, particularly the one about his father, but something held him back. Someone had whispered in his ear that these journeys were secret. Al would make too much sense of them. They would worry him. Al had done so much for him already; Cecil didn’t want to worry him. So when Al inquired after his health, and why he looked like he hadn’t slept (which in fact he had, and quite a lot, as much as he could manage) Cecil angrily avoided the question. Their meetings because fewer and fewer, but Cecil didn’t notice because he hated the daylight and the demands it brought. He started taking sleeping pills on the weekends to fall back into the abyss of sleep even when his body was sore and achy. They didn’t always work.

Sometimes he stayed on earth, or at least on a planet like earth, traveling with his companion cloaked in black. They went deep into Radon Canyon, beyond where even the boy scouts would go, and touched the earth’s spine at the bottom and played with the metal shards left at the bomb testing site. They listened to its secrets. They were often famished from these travels, and made meals of rocks, sand, and other inedible things, but Cecil liked blood the best. He was told by the Other he liked blood the best. He squeezed small animals until their offerings came rushing forth. He stood in the middle of the floor altar and chanted and the Other chanted and Cecil felt big and whole. He was himself for the first time in his life, he was sure of it. When he was a child people called him an Outsider (and still did when they thought he wasn’t listening) but now he was on the Outside looking out, and they were looking in. He contained in himself all of the Outside, or a greater share of it than other people had. He was special. He found a  special place. He did not want to return to his meat body with its false images. He did not want to be pushed around by his bosses and pay his bills and go for re-education. How could they educate him when he was so beyond their experiences? The Other told him this over and over again. The Other spoke his native tongue but made it soft and sweet.

He felt so powerful. He could take on anything, and twist it between his tentacles. They went to the wastes outside desert bluffs and fought some monster. Cecil was momentarily scared but ultimately successful and he wanted to howl into the night and claim his victory for all to see.

When he woke that morning he was cold and wet even though the sheets were still on. He didn’t own a mirror so he didn’t notice anything until he stepped into the shower except that his back felt heavy and his muscles felt soar. In the harsh light of a single bulb he saw that two tentacles were hanging down his back – the defensive kind, of course. They were limp now; whatever brains they had died when danger was over. They would be dried by the end of the day but until then they made him feel gross. He knew they would ruin his shirt, but if he tried to pull them off now he knew (from experience) that they would just bleed a ton.

Cecil could not remember growing them in his sleep before. No nightmare was that vicious, and this hadn’t been a nightmare. It was a victory, a successful wild hunt. He wasn’t scared, just irritated at his uncomfortable position. He resorted to wrapping them up in ace bandages that wound around his chest and back, which was the very definition of “uncomfortable chill” down his spine the whole day. He cut out early again, this time for medical reasons, and practically tore them off in his bathroom.

In his dreams, he was so indefinably sure of who he was. In Night Vale, he was nothing. An Outsider with no origin of note, an accident, and now a nothing reporter who wasn’t allowed to properly report. It made him sick. He started sleeping pills during the week, as soon as he got home from work. He was hungry and angrier in his dreams. The Other would sometimes goad him on and sometimes tell him to calm down, but it would always praise him and say it was there to guide him. He fought beasts in the wastes and the fields. He tore apart a car on the road. He thirsted for blood.

One morning he made his dizzy way to the shower to find blood beneath his fingernails. A quick inspection of his body, never thorough without the aid of a mirror, revealed nothing else except bruises on his shoulder blades. Bedsores? Was that how they formed? Could they make him bleed? He stopped the sleeping pills for a few days, just to be sure, but he now hated being awake. His spare hours were dedicated trying to record what he had seen and done (with some important exclusions) and to write down all the sites and symbols he had been taught.

He was caught scribbling them at work. His work became sporadic again. He didn’t want to be there, awake all day in the annoying sun, doing stupid things for stupid people. Things that wouldn’t matter in the cosmic scheme of things. Man ruled now where They ruled once; They will rule soon where Man Rules now. He wrote a column about it, actually. It was pure gibberish, only half of it in English and bastardized Latin and the rest in a poor transliteration of a language he’d heard in a dreams.

It did not run. Instead, he was fired, and ordered to report to reeducation in the morning. “This is a very serious offense, Cecil.” She did not explain why, and he didn’t care.

            ****************************************

Reeducation didn’t work.

He didn’t quite remember all of it, but enough to know he remembered too much. They sought his sun memories in the daylight, but they couldn’t touch or didn’t know to touch his dreams. He spaced out in the chair, oddly removed from the pain of the electrodes to his brain which could not interrupt the mantra. _Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn! Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn!_ But he played along because it did hurt and he wanted to get out of there, and was even more confused as to why he was fired.

He had once resource left - one way to find good, permanent work and that was Al. Algonquin, the same person whom he had pushed away so recently and could now go crawling back to without explanation. Would it really be so bad? When _wasn’t_ Al understanding?

Cecil decided to sleep on it. He did not take any sleeping pills (though the shots of malt liquor probably helped) and let himself naturally drift off, hoping for a peaceful night’s rest. And then all at once he was his other self, guided by the soothing voice of the Other, and they were on the chase again, looking for new prey. Birds? Dinosaurs? Trucks? Anything with flesh or presenting a challenge would satisfy him. He had more tentacles than he could count and they were a sacred part of him. The Other guided him, building on his desire and impatience until he found his prey – a somewhat tubby, wobbling man who did not make it very far.

Instead of using his newfound limbs, Cecil decided on his hands. His thick, muscular hands that were almost claws around the man’s throat, and he cried –

It was Earl.

Earl Harlan.

This was a dream, yes, but he wasn’t oblivious to his surroundings and something ached inside him and he realized it was his heart. Despite everything in their past he loved Earl – maybe not the way Earl needed to be loved, but they had been friends. Lovers. Eagle scouts together. He could taste the blood from the blood oath in his mouth. The one he took with Earl.

The Other was taunting him but he willed himself to stop, dropping Earl to the ground. He felt real panic. He was not in control of this dream and he had no way of expressing his dislike. He was too far gone in the beast for words, but too close to human to forget who he was, and who _Earl_ was, and he tried to will himself out of sleep by taking a deep breath and –

There was a blast of cold air, but not from his bedroom. He was standing there, over a semi-conscious Earl, but the edges were sharper and he could see regular stars above him, and the only light other than the moon, which was at full and therefore a good deal of light itself, was from the hooded figure’s flashlight. Actually, it was just a guy in the hoodie, who was still talking to him in that language he didn’t recognize.

The voice, he did. “Dean?”

The hoodie was pulled down and Dean Curwen shined his flashlight in Cecil’s, temporarily blinding him. “What?”

“Am I – where am I?” He looked around, but it was the same setting. The same scrublands near Radon Canyon, where he’d chased Earl in his dream. He was cold because he was naked except for his pajama bottoms and the cold sand was between his toes. But he had to still be dreaming, because the tentacles – he still hand those. Not the ones he was used to, but the dream ones, that flailed around of their own free will now. He could not see how many there were. They were tugging at his flesh and his will and he had to ignore them for the time being. “Am I still dreaming?”

Dean sighed, dropping the flashlight so it illuminated the ground. “No, I don’t think you are.”

“But what are you doing here? And Earl – Holy shit, Earl!” He knelt down and saw that though most of Earl’s clothing was torn and there were red spots that would be bruises, he was relatively unharmed. Cecil shook him, but he did not wake. “Earl!”

“Relax. He’s just drugged. He won’t remember anything tomorrow.”

Cecil did not like Dean’s laid-back attitude. “What is he doing out here?”

“You were going to kill him. Duh.” Dean almost looked bored. “I guess you didn’t have it in you. Are you still in love with him?”

“It’s not about being in love, it’s about – fuck you, it’s none of your business!” Cecil stood up and his tentacles thrashed and Dean took a step back. “Tell me what’s going on! Where did I go when I was dreaming?”

“You weren’t dreaming,” Dean said with a little more alarm. “You were asleep, but you were still awake – it’s hard to explain. I don’t even know how you woke up! You’ve never done that before.”

“I’ve never tried to kill my best friend before.” Cecil returned to Earl’s side, but he didn’t have the strength to carry him alone. “We have to get him to a hospital.”

“It’s just a roofie. And how are we going to explain it, huh? How are we going to explain you?” He pointed in Cecil’s general direction, his pointer making a circling gesture to indicate the tentacles. “I don’t know how to make them go back in. You always did that yourself.”

They would retract or break off, right? Right? Cecil was feeling less confused and more frightened. “If I tell them – “

“ _No_ , Cecil. You can’t tell them anything.” Dean was using that voice – the voice of the Other. Was he that guide the whole time? Did he travel with him to the space beyond the stars? “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

Cecil looked around, as if the sand dunes would offer clues. The truth was, he didn’t. He had officially lost track of night and day now, and this conversation wasn’t helping. His voice was small when he answered, “What have I done?”

Dean laughed. Actually fucking laughed. “Jesus, Cecil, what haven’t you done? All those animals – those people – that car you bashed into a wall – those deer we found near Desert Bluffs.” He shook his head. “The police are looking for _someone_. They just don’t know it’s you. So if you show up in a public place looking like that what are they going to think, exactly?”

Even if he went home, the policeman would be waiting there. He would see him in this form. Cecil didn’t even know what he looked like now, only that it was terrible to behold. All that made him feel great and powerful was now a weakness. He was an abomination. “I have to get out of here. But not before I get Earl to safety. He could die of exposure.”

“You know you can’t leave Night Vale,” Dean said, even though it technically wasn’t a fact. Cecil just never tried. “Look, I’ll help you. My basement is a blind spot. No one can even tell it exists – even Al with his almighty Voice powers and whatever else that station lets him do. You can stay down there until we get this figured out.” He looked at Earl’s body held against Cecil’s. “And we’ll drop off Earl first. But you have to hide in the trunk.”

Dean had a car. Cecil didn’t remember how the dream started, or how he’d gotten here, but Dean had at least driven. Cecil kissed Earl on the head as they loaded him in the backseat and Dean opened the trunk. It did not exactly look cozy in there, but Cecil fit.

He spent the ride trying to keep himself from hyperventilating. He could feel the tentacles squirming around them but they were like foreign objects that happened to be attached to his body. He held his breath as Dean dropped Earl on a coat outside the hospital and sped off. He almost kept the air inside him until they got to the house, and the cool, dark basement.

The altar was new, but he recognized it as if it wasn’t. As if he’d seen it – well, not in his dreams, he now realized. It had a real stone base with artisan hand-carvings of sacred inscriptions. There were multiple tools on the table on the side, along with the book that caused all of this trouble, and the altar stone was anointed with blood. His blood? He didn’t remember.

This was still a terrible dream that he wanted to wake up from. He was cold, not because the tentacles were slimy (they weren’t) but because it was night in the desert and he doubted he could even put on a shirt. Dean appeared with a blanket and a glass of water. “Take is easy, dude. Breathe.”

His chest was still tight. He didn’t like the stale basement air or the incense from the altar. He didn’t like the blood stains on the floor. He was scared and he couldn’t _wake up_.

“Relax.” Dean rubbed his back in the places that he had access. Cecil’s tentacles stopped flailing around as much with each deep breath that he forced himself to take. “NO one’s going to find you here. We’re going to figure this out.”

Cecil still didn’t want to believe, but – “What did you do?”

“I didn’t know I was affecting you. I thought I was asleep! I thought I just fell asleep while meditating,” Dean said in a hurry. “You were in my dreams because – well, we’ve done this together. We found the book together, we both read it, we were both affected by it – it’s linked to both of us. So I didn’t think anything of it. And the dreams, they were so incredible, right?”

Cecil nodded furiously as he forced himself to drink. He didn’t realize how parched he was until now.

“So I kept reading, and making notes, and doing outside research. By the time I realized the dreams were real, I didn’t know how to tell you. You said you didn’t want to talk to me during the day and at night you were ... someone totally different. I didn’t handle it well.”

“How did Earl get involved?”

“He’s not involved. He just – look, I don’t know how we did anything that we did. You were driving everything. That book – it’s taught me so much about you, Cecil. Wonderful things.” He put a hand over Cecil’s, but Cecil pulled back. “You told me you know who your father is. That meant something to you, but I couldn’t make it out.”

Again Cecil nodded, but he didn’t answer. He didn’t want to share. He didn’t want to say the name. It would be ... beneath him.

“Cecil, you might not believe this, but you are _incredible_ ,” Dean said. “Maybe growing up with us meant you had to suppress it, or Night Vale made you suppress it, but in you is more strength and power than I’ve ever seen. I don’t think you should let these things in town stop you from being who you are. Maybe that’s why you’re so unhappy.”

Perhaps Cecil should have said something to contradict him, but he remained silent. He was – he did feel that way in the dreams. He wasn’t happy in his life outside of them. Where had he gone so far wrong? Why had no one ever told him? Was it because no one knew?

Was it really just chance that that book fell into his hands?

“Those things – some of those things I think I might have done, I don’t want them to be real,” he finally answered. “I don’t want to do those things. Christ, I almost killed Earl tonight. I would have killed him and if you hadn’t stopped me ... I think I would have eaten him. Shit, I would have. I would have.” He grabbed Dean’s wrist. “We have to stop this. You have to help me stop this.”

Dean smiled. “Don’t worry. I’m going to get you all the help you need.”


	7. Avatar

Chapter 7

2013

In the morning, Cecil asked Carlos to accompany him on an errand. He did specify and Carlos did not ask. Cecil seemed serious, the gears in his head non-literally turning over breakfast. He still left the rest of Algonquin’s letters untouched, preferring to read the notebook again. He did not need to say he was afraid. Carlos was sure he would do it, but only when the time was right, and Cecil did not have the confidence now. Before he could even leave his apartment he was taking text messages, phone calls, and was almost assaulted by a reporter from the pres corp, whom Carlos had never seen outside of a press conference for the mayor or the City Council, demanding answers about the station’s “mechanical problems.”

“I’m working on it, Cecil said. “ _Go away_.” The intonation in his voice was, well, distinct, and Carlos guessed that he might have heard the Voice for the first time.

They lived near the center of town, but Cecil drove in the opposite direction, taking them out past the scrublands and the Whispering Forest.

“Might I ask where we’re going?”

“John Peter’s house,” Cecil said. “You know, the farmer?”

“I’m very aware of that, yes.”

“He helped me a long time ago,” Cecil said, and that was the end of the conversation. He clearly didn’t mean to be rude; he just had a lot going on in his head that he didn’t want to go chattering on about before the ideas were fully-formed. His whole attitude had turned rather sober since receiving the package from the mayor, but understandably so.

Carlos squeezed Cecil’s cheek. “I love you. You know that?” He wanted to be supportive, but he didn’t know how.

It made Cecil smile, at least. “I’m keeping you from science.”

“I have a feeling what he has to say might be very scientific.”

“I don’t think he would put it that way,” Cecil explained as they pulled up at the old farm house. In addition to the silo and chicken coops it had solar panels on the roof, but otherwise didn’t look younger than fifty years old.

The farmer of some fame for his occupation looked even older. He was sitting out on the porch, chewing on straw (which was impressive, considering the land around him was completely without grass or apparent crops of any kind) with a jug of what Carlos assumed to be a corn-based liquor of some kind on the floor next to him.

“I was figurin’ you were gettin’ enough texts about the station,” John said, rocking slowly back and forth in his wooden chair. “Could barely get it out here last night. Found the transmission in my Dutch oven.” He offered up the jug. Cecil waved his hand politely. “I figured you had better things to do than drink your sorrows away.” He offered it to Carlos. “Mr. Scientist.”

“How’s the crops, Mr. Peters?” Because honestly, Carlos had no idea.

“Comin’ in real fine.” John took a long swig for himself. “So. What brings the big ol’ Voice of Night Vale to my door?”

“I got a letter from Al. He sent it before he died and it was just passed on to me,” Cecil said with surprising frankness. “He told me why I went to Europe. He told me that I don’t have the full powers of the Voice of Night Vale because I can’t remember it.”

“Your Sahasrara chakra is blocked.” John removed his hat and patted the very top of his head, then replaced the hat. “Must have been the secret police, what they done to you to take away all those memories. They go in from the top.”

“Can you open it?”

“Not like your Ajna chakra. It can’t be opened manually like that or everyone would be doin’ it. Hell, I wouldn’t be sitting here drinkin’ and blowing corn if I was beyond this stage o’ consciousness. Nah, it’s not gonna be that easy.”

Cecil grimaced. “It wasn’t that easy the last time.”

John looked at Carlos. “Big sissy he was. Screamin’ and cryin’ – “

“John, please,” Cecil begged. “Help me.”

John opened the door to beckon them inside. After offering them tea he told Cecil to lie down on the kitchen table. John retrieved a little makeup container and used whatever was in it to paint a red dot on Cecil’s forehead, right over his trepanning scar. “My medicine’s a little rusty.”

“Acupuncture?” Carlos asked.

“That’s Chinese,” John corrected. “Nothing against it, I just don’t know nothing about it.”

“I was kind of hoping you might be able to open my Eye again,” Cecil said. “It was so intense in the beginning.”

“It’s still open. Your ability to use it lapses over time.” The farmer touched the top of Cecil’s head with his palm and started to massage it. “What are you looking to do?”

Cecil retrieved a note from his packet with the NVCR stamp on it. “Carlos, please give this to the officer behind the porch.”

The Secret Police were easy to find when you were looking and waving a piece of paper that looked very official. The officer emerged from the shrubbery he was holding in place, looked at it, and said, “Okay, but this is only good for an hour.” He pulled out a cigarette and walked off, lightning it as he went.

Cecil had held the conversation until Carlos was back in. “Do you remember Dean Curwen?”

“I know I’m not supposed to,” John said. “Reeducation doesn’t work real good on me since I got back from Nepal. Can’t say I know much about him, though.”

“So you remember all the things the Deputy Sheriff told me?” Carlos said. “How half the town was destroyed around 199 – “

“It was more like a third,” John said, not ceasing his scalp massage. “Took all my cattle. I used to have a lot of them. Well, you know, can’t hold onto material things. Life is impermanence and all that.”

“But you know what caused it,” Cecil said.

“You did,” John answered without hesitation. “’course it wasn’t really _you_ at that point. Was like you were all twisted up. So don’t feel too bad about it.”

Carlos wanted to move the conversation away from what Cecil had done. “It started in the Curwen house. There’s an altar there, and we need to destroy it. It’s affecting the radio station.”

“It’s affecting me,” Cecil admitted, though he had not said anything about this previously.

“And what woke it up? ‘cuz it musta been sleeping.”

“I, uh, might have had something to do with that,” Carlos said, and repeated the story of his adventure in the House That Did Not Exist, but did not reference the Necronomicon by name. “So it’s all my fault.”

John shrugged. “It was just sleeping, so it was going to wake up sooner or later. Town shoulda taken care of it.”

“They tried,” Carlos said. “They tried burning it down, tearing it down, everything they could do. The altar has to be broken but they can’t even find it. They didn’t know about it. Isaac says the altar is so strong because there’s probably a presence there.”

“I’m the only one who knows what’s in that altar,” Cecil said guiltily. “But I don’t remember.”

The farmer paused his massage and scratched at the wisp of a beard his chin sported. “There’s meditation you can try, but it mostly just creates false memories.” He looked down at Cecil’s face. “You _do_ need to go up to the piece of yourself in the stars.”

“I’m just going to pretend what we’re doing here is science,” Carlos said, mainly to himself.

“The science of the mind,” the farmer said curtly. “Cecil, yeh need to call on a real guru. Someone bigger than yourself. You give yourself up to a guide.”

“Al is dead.”

“So’s Randolph. Queer feller he was. But Al could call on him. He said he used the station.”

Cecil’s eyes went wide. “Did he?”

“Don’t think he was lying to me.” John smiled. “You’ll know what to do.”

            ****************************************

“I didn’t get a scalp massage,” Carlos said in the car.

“I think it was ayurvedic medicine,” Cecil said. “But I can give you one when we get home. It just won’t be very medicinal.”

Carlos was just happy to see Cecil in a better mood. “So are we summoning the dead?”

“Technically not. Necromancy is only allowed on the first Thursday of the month,” Cecil answered, because of course it was. “We have to speak to the Randy who lives between the stars. But it’ll still be very dangerous.”

“Might I ask _how_ it will be dangerous?”

“Existentially.”

Carlos rolled his eyes. At least he would get some good readings out of this – if any of his equipment worked, of course. As serious as the situation actually was, sometimes he was just overloaded on details that would be nonsense anywhere else but he was supposed to run with, and he sensed he would not be getting a break today.

They stopped to eat lunch and pick up Carlos’s equipment before returning to the station. The mail was spread out across the parking lot. The postman must have dumped it from the road, unwilling to even pull into the driveway. There were still no interns and Carlos could hear the grumbling from Station Management outside the building. Either his eyes were playing tricks on him or the building was throbbing with unease.

“I don’t actually know if this will work,” Cecil said as they put the break room table up against the wall to reveal a circle of carvings in the linoleum floor. “Or if it will work soon enough. I still have to do the show.”

“What is ‘this’ exactly?” Carlos set up his seismograph and Geiger counter as Cecil chalked the floor and cleaned the station bloodstone altar.

“It’s not really raising the dead. I’m not reaching the part of Randolph Carter that is dead. I’m trying to reach him beyond time. So we can create a space to call out to him, but if he doesn’t come, he probably can’t hear and I – we – might have to meet him halfway.” He took Carlos’s arm. “You don’t have to be a part of this. I know you think this is a joke.”

“It’s never been a joke to me,” Carlos corrected. “It’s just not how I would do things.” As long as he didn’t see a ouiji board...

Cecil did nothing from the sort. There was no holding hands, no calling out Randolph’s name in a spooky voice. After Cecil made his offering on the bloodstone altar, he carefully drew runes along the lining of the circle, mixing his own blood liberally with the chalk. The chant that came after it was long and trance-inducing. It made Carlos tired, less aware of what was going on around him as he was drawn in by Cecil’s voice, though to be fair Cecil had a voice that people were constantly drawn in by. Carlos might have even dozed a couple times, his head slumping forward in the soothing, ethereal room, because when he opened them there were lights dancing in the runes like flickers of flame, and his seismograph was going off in the far, muted distance of a few feet away, telling him to make for a doorframe or a swift exit. He didn’t. He watched Cecil, who was completely absorbed in his task, eyes shut and palms out in front of him as the circle grew stronger the more music it was fed. Then Cecil appeared to be talking towards him ... without getting up. Cecil gestured for him to stand and Carlos did, sort of, though he couldn’t tell if he was still asleep. When they held hands Carlos no longer heard the seismograph or the insistent beeping of the Geiger counter or even the music of the chanting which was still going on. He looked down and saw he was misaligned, for he wasn’t sitting on the ground but the ground was the wall next to him, and the circle was a portal.

“Whatever you do,” Cecil said in his normal voice, “don’t let go of me. For _any reason_.” He squeezed Carlos’s left hand for emphasis. “Do you want to do this?”

He was connected to Cecil and he had never wanted to do anything so badly in his life. “Of course.”

Cecil stepped forward and Carlos followed, dimly aware that he was missing something, possibly his body, but he wasn’t worried too much about it. Cecil was glowing and he seemed to know where he was going. The room they stepped into was filled with shimmering lines going every which way like the wiring inside a very badly-designed computer. Carlos touched one and it made music, and he realized the things were words, all in a long line as someone said them and they passed through this place.

Cecil tugged nervously and Carlos saw that he had stopped walking. “Sorry.” Carlos resumed the pace, in step with his guide and boyfriend. “I’m okay. I did shrums in college so ...”

They walked for an unknown distance and unknown time until they came to what appeared to be a shore, and Cecil made signs over the water, etching them into the air, and a man appeared in their place. He was hovering about a foot above the ground, his body vaguely yellow and translucent. He was wearing a light suit and a safari hat, resembling an old-timey archaeologist.

“Cecil,” he said with a polite nod, but the way he said _Cecil_ was totally different from how Carlos had ever heard it.

“Randy, this is Carlos the Scientist.” Cecil was holding Carlos’s hand tighter than ever, perhaps because he could blow away if he wasn’t careful.

“I’m a professor from Miskatonic,” Carlos stumbled to explain, though he wasn’t sure he mattered.

“Really! My old alma mater. You must be a very distinguished person.” Randy spoke with a thickest combination of a Bostonian and New England accent that Carlos had ever heard. He was speaking a dialect that no longer existed. “But I suppose we shouldn’t gab about old times here. Come with me to Celephaïs sometime. Much more conducive to conversation.” He turned back to Cecil. “What can I do for you?”

“Well ...” Cecil looked like he was about to launch into a long explanation of the crisis at the station, but he didn’t. Words swirled around him and Randy knew. “I want to take the next step, but I’m scared.” It was not something he would casually admit to anyone, but Randolph was not just anyone to him. “John Peters – he’s a farmer – told me that I need a guide.”

“Hmmm. I can’t say I can’t help you, but if you are still closed off, no doorway will open before you. Remember that there is no reason to be afraid of something that has an outcome you already know, either because it has happened to you or because you are seeing it beyond time. Your fear of the unknown shouldn’t apply because it is known. You may have forgotten it but it is known. All things are _known_. On earth you are unable to distinguish these things but they are true.”

“He has a point,” Carlos said. He kind of did.

“I have to remember it in my human body. Please, tell me how to do it.” Cecil really was pleading now, and Carlos could feel his exhaustion through the link between them. He saw how tired Cecil was, run down not just by his job and by Night Vale but from his very real fear of the next step forward, of knowing his own past and the terror he imagined lurked there.

“You think that Algonquin and I made you whole again,” Randy said patiently. “That Algonquin put you back together and I filled up your empty pieces. That isn’t true. You have always been whole; no person can truly be destroyed. Parts of them may move somewhere else but they are still there.”

“The conversation of matter,” Carlos said.

“To remember you must restore all the links that appear to be severed. You must see the world as it really is. But you’ve already done that once, haven’t you?”

“When I became the Voice of Night Vale.” There was a glimmer of hope in Cecil’s eyes. “The Voice of Night Vale is the Avatar of Night Vale, and there can only be one Avatar so there can only be one person. I’m an Avatar of you so ...”

Randolph Carter phased out of existence, and when he returned, the light that shaded his outline was purple like the station, and Carlos knew that he was looking, for the first time, at the real Cecil Baldwin. He appeared almost the same as Carlos’s Cecil – the haircut was a little different and he looked a few years younger – but he defined Cecil-ness. And, being Cecil, the cosmic Cecil said, “ _This is a little weird_.”

“Cecil!” Cecil squealed. “Have you met my boyfriend?” Carlos loved him but damn, he wanted to smack him right now.

“ _We’ve always met_ ,” cosmic Cecil said. “ _I can’t send you back with everything known. It won’t fit in your body. But you can take what you need_.” He put one non-corporeal hand on Cecil’s chest and the other on his forehead, and powerful light flashed where they met, temporarily blinding Carlos. He fell backwards ... and down ... and down, right back down into where he was sitting, with two tingling, aching legs that had fallen asleep. He shook himself away and he was back in the break room across from Cecil, who had his face buried in his hands.

“Cecil? Are you all right?” Carlos stumbled to his feet, still woozy, and ran around the circle to put his hands on Cecil’s back. “What is it?”

“I remember,” Cecil said, his voice a hoarse whisper. “I remember _everything_.”


	8. In the Mouth of Madness

Chapter 8

1995

When Cecil woke in the morning ... or afternoon ... he stumbled around in shock, trying to remember why he was in Dean’s basement. Didn’t they have a fight over something? Reality somewhat literally slapped him in the face when he tried to get through the bathroom door and one of his tentacles swung backwards and hit him in the jaw.

They were still there. They hadn’t shriveled up or fallen off. They didn’t look like they were going to. They were a bit slower now, almost as if they were groggy like he was, but he still had no control over them. He didn’t look in the mirror because he never looked in mirrors, but he circled around until he was sure there were two in the front and two in the back.

They were real. That meant this was all real, and last night was real, and he had almost –

Oh G-d. Oh G-d _Oh G-d Oh G-d -_

Cecil was vomiting in the toilet when he heard footsteps on the stairs. Dean was carrying a box of supplies – food, bottled water, a first aid kit, et cetera. “So.”

Cecil cleaned up and stumbled out of the bathroom.

“Um, how do you feel?”

Like shit. “A little better?” The truth was he didn’t know how to feel. “Did you find out about Earl?”

“Yeah, he slept it off in the hospital. He’s fine.” Dean pulled a set of keys out of his pocket and tossed them on the coffee table. “You still think that fake rock is fooling anybody? There are no other rocks in your hallway.”

“You went to my apartment.”

“I thought you would appreciate some of your stuff until we get this sorted out.” There were indeed clothes in the backpack he also set down. “And I took your bike and put it in my trunk. So if anyone comes looking for you, they’ll think you’re just out somewhere.”

“No offense, but I don’t want to stay here,” Cecil said as he downed a pint of orange milk.

“I’m a little out of my depth,” Dean admitted, as if it was only a little. “But ... maybe we could try to cut them off?” He waved in the general direction of the tentacles. “Then you could at least go home.”

Cecil cringed at the idea. “It might get infected.”

“I was on the basketball team. This won’t exactly be my first surgery,” Dean said. “But if it’s a problem, yeah, you can go to the hospital and hope for the best. You’re not the only one with tentacles in town.”

But he didn’t want to do that. Not yet, anyway. Not while they were looking for him and while he was half-tempted to turn himself in, or maybe would if he was even sure what crimes he had committed. “We can try. But there’s going to be a lot of blood.”

“Again, not my first surgery.” Dean had an impressive first aid kit and dug out a bottle of pills. “Take four of these. We’re not even starting until you’re tore up on something.”

Cecil didn’t question what it was, but it took effect quickly. By the time he was feeling loopy, Dean had set up everything in the bathroom and told Cecil to strip down in the tub. They decided on the tentacle on his lower back because it was far away from arteries and was the most intrusive for putting on a shirt. Cecil did not like the feeling when Dean taped the other ones down with duct tape, but it was a necessary evil.

“I think it’s better if you don’t look at my equipment,” Dean said, and Cecil laid on his stomach, leaning over the edge of the tub. “This is going to feel cold. It’s topical Novacane. Also, can you _try_ to control them?”

“I can _try_ ,” Cecil said, his speech slurred. He could feel Dean’s hand on the tentacle and he held his breath. He could hear the sound of the knife (it was probably big) and beyond that it was screaming – all screaming.

“Cecil, shut up! Jesus!” said a panicked Dean. One of the tentacles had broken free of the tape and was whipping around the room, smashing everything it came into contact with. “I can’t concentrate!” Dean cursed when the shower road and curtain came down on both of them. “Stop it!”

Cecil wanted to scream _I can’t I can’t_ but his mouth was busy. He smelled something burning. “What the fuck?”

“I have to cauterize it!” When Cecil turned his head around to look over his shoulder and see the curling iron, Dean nearly smacked him. “Stay still! Ah _fuck!_ ” He took a tentacle to the face. Cecil couldn’t breathe, but he buried his face deeper in the wall of the tub anyway. He could feel blood pooling at his feet and his back was cold and wet where it wasn’t on fire. He couldn’t hear what Dean was telling him because he screamed until he was out of screams, and needed to stop and inhale, and finally there was no noise.

“Cecil, wake up.” Dean shook him. He did not want to be shaken. He wanted to stay where he was, far away from all this. Cecil turned sideways as throbbing pain returned to the edges of his consciousness. “Cecil, you’ve lost a lot of blood. You need to drink. You need sugar.” He shoved a cup of juice in his face and Cecil swallowed about half of it, coughing the rest up. This was repeated until Dean was satisfied, and wiped Cecil’s face for him. “Don’t move, okay?

Cecil could comply with that. When Dean was gone, he dared to look over the edge of the tub and saw what had been a part of him lying dead on the floor, grey in death on top of a plastic sheet. There was more blood than he imagined he had in him. He felt sick again, but Dean returned and made him eat cookies and drink more before giving him another set of painkillers. “You’re going to be okay.”

Cecil did not believe him, but he did keep waking up after passing out. Dean was kind enough to wipe him down and move him to the couch when the bleeding stopped. Cecil lived there for an unspecified amount of time, only aware when Dean was responsive to his calls for more painkillers. He also gave him weed to take the edge off and stimulate his appetite, and there were increasing amounts of minutes where Cecil did not feel pain. The sun was visible through a very high-placed window that was just around ground level outside, so he knew when it was day or night, and a few of those went by. He watched cartoons, or whatever else was on Dean’s television that made noise. He took as many pills as Dean would give him and smoked as much as he could inhale, and that left him in a comfortable haze. He dreamed, but it was not as intense as before.

He was starting to feel like an unwashed bum when Dean returned from a shopping run and checked his bandages. “How do you feel?”

“Shitty, but ...” He wiggled one hand. The other held the bong. The television remote was being handled by his tentacle.

Shit, could he use his tentacles? How long had that been going on?

“I was going to ask, do you want to try again? Because you still have – “

“No.” As much as the idea of them becoming an essential part of him terrified him, he could not get the image of the dead limb on the bathroom floor out of his head and felt an uncomfortable sadness. “Not yet. Not now.” He tried to clear his head. “Do you want me to go?”

“No. You can’t take care of yourself,” Dean replied. It was probably true. “And we still, you know, have the problem.”

Cecil felt useless. He couldn’t think of anything to do. He couldn’t think properly at all.

“You did retract them when we were dreaming,” Dean said. “You could do that when you were in a trance. We could try – I know last time, it went badly, but we’ll be on guard for that. I just didn’t think you were strong enough over the last few days.”

“I guess, yeah.” Cecil didn’t want to say how uncomfortable he was with the idea. Dean was such a good host, and Cecil had no other options, but he didn’t trust himself. He didn’t want to become a monster again. “Can you be a little more specific about what you want to try?”

“Yeah, sure. With you here, it should be much easier to guide the dreams. I’ll show you my research.” He did give a long presentation. Cecil barely caught any of it, but Dean was excited about it.

 _Wait, had Dean said guide? As in he has done this before?_ The thought popped into Cecil’s brain but didn’t stay there long enough for him to ask about it. Plus it seemed rude.

They practiced some chants before the sun set. They seemed like fairly ordinary ones. Dean brought Cecil’s bloodstones over from his apartment – something Cecil would never have allowed him to do if he asked, but now provided a comfort, as Cecil could set up his own circle in the corner and make his usual prayers and meditations that he had missed during his illness. The altar was still stone-less, but it both of their blood on it, and a new ritual cloth.

Dean just told him to go to sleep, which of course made it ten times harder to do, but Cecil was still fairly weak and he could only stay awake so long. He did not remember any of the chants in his dreams, though there certainly was a lot of chanting. Dean was there and they went for a walk outside. It being a dream, Cecil couldn’t comprehend whether he was actually doing it or not, but he liked the feeling of being on cool sand again, and fresh air, and manic sounds in the distance. The sky was lit with different constellations then he remembered and he reached out to touch one, dragging it down to earth with his impressively long arm. He could feel the heat of the stars and was proud of his work. He traveled a long way and he fought monsters. He felt a delight he had not felt since childhood, even if he could not defeat the last one.

Cecil scratched his nose, or tried to, but his hand hit a wall and he felt a sharp tug behind him. It was morning again, and the departing dream was leaving him and taking its calming gore and endless void and leaving him in an increasing panic when he found he couldn’t move either of his arms or his tentacles. Only his legs were free and he kicked uselessly at the air, metal tearing into his sides.

“Dean!” he screamed, not lowering his voice when Dean stumbled over him. “ _Why am I tied to your fucking radiator?!?_ ”

“Relax. It’s not on. We barely ever put that thing on. I don’t know if it even works anymore.” Dean yawned. “Look, I had to fuckin’ make do, okay? You attacked me in your sleep.”

“I’m not relaxing! I don’t care what I did in my sleep.”

“You would have killed me,” Dean said, his voice very cold and very serious, but he did approach and unlocked both of the handcuffs, freeing Cecil but not his tentacles, which were tied up around his torso with a long chain, probably meant as a dog leash. “Just sit down and let’s talk about this. Here – I brought you some breakfast.”

The bag from McDonald’s did smell good. Cecil huffed but did sit on the couch and drink the coffee. “You were supposed to help me get rid of my tentacles. Instead – shit, is one of them back?”

Dean looked at his back, where the appendage had been removed. “Looks like it. Well, shit. There isn’t exactly an instruction book for this. I’m doing the best I can. We’ll just have to try something else to get rid of them.”

Cecil flinched at ‘get rid of them.’ As much as yes, technically, he wanted to get back to normal and be able to leave this safe house, part of his brain was ... happy the fourth one was back. There was no longer a healing wound and he felt complete. But he had to think rationally. “Maybe we should just go to the City Council and confess everything. I’ll get the worst of it. You’ve still got a relative on it right?”

“Third cousin,” Dean said dismissively.

“And they’ll put me through reeducation, and how many times have I been through that? I don’t know, but that’s the point.”

“I don’t think you’re going to get off that easily,” Dean replied. “My cousin is on it, yeah, but he became like, a different person when he joined. He’s not himself anymore. He’s part of a thing, and that thing cares more about its own safety than any citizen’s welfare. We’d be _lucky_ to get off with reeducation. We’d be lucky to get out of there alive. You probably have a record and I’m probably on a watch list because of my inter-library loans. If you leave this house, we’re basically screwed so ... you’re going to have to trust me. I got you into this, and I’m going to get you out of it.”

Cecil wished he could trust the person who was giving him a safe haven, but – “Give me the key.” His chains were held together with a suitcase padlock.

“You promise you’ve got this under control?”

“You’re going to have to trust me.”

Dean winced and handed him the key. They were heavier than they looked, and tangled up, so eventually Dean had to help him get all of hi extra limbs free. They did not attack Dean, or appear to want to for the time being.

“Are you controlling them or - ?”

“I don’t know.” Honesty he didn’t. He could feel them more than he could before, more than he’d ever felt his defensive tentacles. When they rubbed against the soft couch or the hard wall he felt it. The ends had little flippers with suction cups on the other side, and those were particularly sensitive. One found its way to his palm. It was a weird sensation like touching himself, only more intense. “Definitely more than I could before. The solution might just be time.”

“There are still some things I want to try,” Dean said. “How do you feel? I mean about last night, not how you woke up, because seriously, I had to do that.”

“It was incredible.” There was no use denying it. Cecil was still in love with the power he had in those dreams. “I touched the void. _Touched it_ , Dean.”

He told Dean a lot about the void. They smoked and tried to relax. Cecil wanted to hear Algonquin’s voice so Dean brought a radio down even though it wasn’t show time yet. They spent most of the day stoned and listening to the radio.

“Someday ... someday I’m going to be the Voice of Night Vale,” Cecil said, from nowhere.

“You? What about your stutter?”

“I’m not stuttering now.”

“You’re totally baked now.”

“Look, I just know it, okay?” Cecil insisted. “I just know.”

“I guess that means we get out of this alive.”

“Yeah. I guess so.”

            ****************************************

The next few days, or what seemed like a few days, passed in a long haze. Cecil’s dreams were vivid and increasingly violent even though Dean said he was taking a break to do more research. Ceil helped with that research some of the time, but he couldn’t focus for very long. He never seemed to have enough sleep. He spent most of the day napping on the mattress Dean dragged down for him. His appetite came and went in rapid succession, but Dean always insisted he keep drinking juice, even when he wasn’t thirsty.

Bloodstains started showing up on his clothing. He didn’t know where they were from but he couldn’t manage to get worked up about them. Dean didn’t want to talk about it and just offered him new clothes, some from his apartment and some that still had labels on them. Dean was increasingly uneasy around him but also sweet. He took food orders, fixed the television when one of Cecil’s tentacles broke it, and generally kept him company, only leaving for supplies and some assorted errands. He talked about leaving Night Vale and staying permanently in the dream. Cecil said nothing. He couldn’t bring himself to lie and say the idea didn’t appeal to him. Dean told Cecil that he was wonderful, a and Dean was in awe of him, because Cecil was a son of Yuggoth and had a greater share of the outside than Dean would ever be able to handle. They shared some beers one night and Dean kissed him and mumbled part of that incantation. Cecil lost control very quickly, but it wasn’t as rough as before, maybe because the spell was half-finished or maybe because he was just better at understanding his own desires. He didn’t want to hurt Dean even when his body was shouting at him to do it. But Dean had asked for it so ... it was a mess, or it would have been in Cecil remembered it all, but the next Dean just rubbed him on the head and said it was fine, it was all really fine. Cecil was himself a gate to the greater outside, Dean said, and he should be proud of it.

Cecil wasn’t used to taking pride in his heritage since he was basically an Outsider and probably an orphan. So he listened, but he missed the real outside – the ordinary outside Night Vale that he only visited in increasingly confusing dreams now.

“I think we should consecrate the altar with our bloodstones,” Dean said, and after waiting for Cecil to figure out the mechanics of that in his head, he clarified, “Both of them in the same circle.”

Cecil, who was feeling particularly sleepy that afternoon, said, “That’s dangerous.” It had been drilled into him in kindergarten, and then again in bloodstone ed, before he qualified for his own circle. “Are you, like, in love with me?”

“No, I just think we could control the dreams better if we joined forces,” Dean said, sounding reasonable. “First I have to find you, then you just go off and do whatever you want to whatever you want because you’re so much more powerful.” He knelt next to Cecil, who was lounging on the mattress. “If we could control it – and what we’re doing now isn’t working – think of what we could accomplish. We could do anything.”

Cecil nodded. They put the stones together that night – or Dean did. Cecil was tired and headache-y, and anxious to go to sleep and leave this small world for a better one.

That night he traveled to a new world. Dean was with him. They sailed on a golden-flecked boat and were greeted as welcome guests. Cecil would not remember any details of the city, but they were wonderful. He hunted in the wild lands while Dean celebrated in the palace. Again Cecil faced the monster from his earlier dreams and again Cecil failed to defeat him, but he didn’t go down without a fight and the spilling of blood that he could still taste when he woke.

To say he woke was too extreme. Cecil drifted in and out of consciousness, dimly aware that his body was stiff and sore and his hand was throbbing and he couldn’t move his tentacles, but the cheap mattress beneath him was so soft and inviting. It was dark before he was aware enough to sit up, which he found very difficult with only partial use of his arms. There were chains wrapped around his torso again, his time connected to the radiator by a long chain leash, but his hands and forearms were free. The right one was covered in bandages. Anger stirred within him but his body didn’t respond. Dean appeared from nowhere and gave him something to drink and some painkillers.

“You were really violent last night.” Dean had bruises around his neck. “I’m sorry but – this is the way it has to be.”

Cecil tried to say something but he was already tired again. He wanted his hand to stop hurting. He mumbled something about a doctor and fell over, finding an uncomfortable sleep with his body still wrapped up in metal links.

His tentacles were screaming – not literally, but like unused limbs tended to do – but he didn’t have the will to answer. He didn’t really have an answer. His hand hurt less the next day when Dean cleaned the wound. There was blood on the bathroom floor that Cecil did not recognize. Dean said things to him that he did not recognize, or maybe just didn’t hear.

He asked to be released. His body was very unhappy and he could barely move around the room. He could only get to the bathroom and the couch, and almost all the way to the altar.

“ _No_ ,” Dean said firmly. “Cecil, sit down.”

Some part of him was rebelling, but Cecil sat.

“We’re in this together,” Dean told him. “We’re linked now. Remember that.”

He left, leaving Cecil to ponder what that meant, but he couldn’t pull together any answers. He was still fairly sure of when he was awake and when he was asleep because he was in pain when he was awake and free when he was asleep. Dean took him to places he didn’t always want to go, but they always seemed worse before they actually got there, and there would be something good for him to eat. The taste of blood was constantly in his mouth. He chewed right through mouse bones and was surprised to find the leftover remains on the floor next to him. Had that really happened? He didn’t know anymore.

Dean was gone for increasing periods of time. He left him food and plenty of bottled war, and if he forgot to leave the remote in a reasonable distance he at least left the TV on, usually tuned to a cooking or music station. Cecil tried to read, but the book was way out of reach on the opposite side of the room and there were times when Cecil couldn’t concentrate or focus his eyes on the words. In panic he reached out to Dean – who wasn’t there – and he thought he heard something, like Dean talking to someone who was not there. Maybe Dean was dreaming.

_“ – totally out of control. She’s building up a resistance to – “_

_“- did you try – “_

_“The manual says that’s a conflict drug.”_

Cecil couldn’t put together the proper image, and he lost the noise entirely after only a few seconds. When Dean returned what was probably hours later Cecil expected to be scolded, but Dean said nothing about it, and Cecil did not ask where he’d been.

“I want to listen to the radio.”

Dean didn’t even look up from the book, which was next to the altar. “Cecil, no.”

“I want to hear Al’s voice.”

Dean sighed and turned on the radio, but it was too low for Cecil to really make it out. He listened anyway, and that soothing voice brought a peace to him that would not have come otherwise.

            ****************************************

Dean was gone for several days before Cecil realized it. His food was mostly eaten up and his spring water plastic gallon was empty and he had to get water from the sink. He hadn’t showered in a while because Dean had taken to washing his hair for him. The collar around his neck did not have enough slack for him to go very far. It was a choke chain and it dug in very hard.

_How long have I bean wearing this?_

Cecil felt panic rising with the feeling of claustrophobia but he stamped it down. It wouldn’t help him. Trying to fight it meant it would just hurt him more; Dean told him that. He was sure his whole body was filled with sores beneath the chains, or at least his tentacles were, and they were painful ones. He usually didn’t feel this much pain. What was wrong today?

He tried to get his head out of the collar, as it was a dog collar and giving it enough slack would just loosen it, but there was a huge padlock in the back of his neck. It seemed heavy.

 _How did it get like this?_ And more importantly, _Where is Dean? I need to talk to him_.

He was increasingly antsy as time passed. He shivered, feeling like there was something crawling beneath his skin. He looked through the first aid kit for pain medication, but there was nothing left. The television was off – nothing to distract him. He breathed in every-increasing short breaths, feeling the need to scratch an impossible itch, but swinging back and force made every sore scream.

_I have to get out of here._

He looked around the room. Sometimes Dean left the keys lying around, but there was no sign of them. There was only his backpack, which –

 _Wait. He takes that everywhere. Could something have happened to him?_ Because if something had happened to Dean, then –

_How the hell am I getting out of here?_

Images of his skeletal form wasted away and cover in cobwebs rose to his mind and he couldn’t breath, and he made himself lie down quietly until he could take a breath without worrying about choking. He could snag on the collar, bleed to death, and no one would find him here. Dean said it was a blind spot. Even Al couldn’t see him.

Oh Al. There was nothing Cecil wanted more than to hear his voice. More than he wanted painkillers, or to stop hurting, or to be free ...

The backpack. Everything had to be in the backpack. But there was no way he could reach it. His arms were too short, and his tentacles – He felt around in the chains, looking for some loosening of something, some opening of some shackle cuff that held them even more firmly in place, and he felt like he could almost get one of them loose if it was just a little bit thinner ...

Cecil was close to hyperventilating again when he came up with the only possible answer. He had to cut one of his tentacles. He could probably get away with just cutting enough for it to come loose, and grab the backpack. There was a razor for shaving that he had not used for a long time but it was hardly thick or sharp enough. He’d just be peeling off skin. And Dean only gave him plastic ware so –

The dagger. The ritual dagger on the altar, the one that had probably been in Dean’s family for generations, and one Cecil would never have otherwise presumed to be allowed to touch, but now he needed it. He found it was at the very end of his rope, so to speak, and he felt the collar digging into his neck and drawing blood as he reached forward with his legs and managed to knock it off its pedestal before he cut his throat open.

“I’m sorry,” he said to the tentacle, “but I have to do this.” He bit down hard as he cut into his own flesh trying not to scream (even though some attention from neighbors would be a help right now) as hot tears rolled down his eyes and made it hard to guide the blade. There was blood and thrashing but he held firm and at least, the blood made the metal slick the metal and the injured tentacle sprung forth.

He was surprised at how much control he had over it. It was just a limb, like his hands or his feet. It hurt to stretch it very far, or do anything with it because it was still bleeding, but he could reach the backpack, and pulled it close to him before he grabbed a towel and lovingly held it around the tentacle until he stopped bleeding.

Then he turned to the backpack. He found some spare keys, but not the ones he was looking for. Dean wouldn’t be stupid enough to leave them behind, Cecil belatedly realized. The only real item of interest was a notebook. Cecil was fairly sure he hadn’t seen it before. He opened it and let it fall to a random page.

_4/22_

_5 mg Klonopin_

_2.5 mg Ativan (administered at bed)_

_Couldn’t control the dream last night again. I wanted to go to the silver city, Cecil didn’t. I asked him why but of course he still doesn’t speak in that form. I tried to teach him. Lost the whole night. A waste._

_4/23_

_5 mg Klonopin_

_Cecil is cranky today. I think it’s because I didn’t let him eat last night. We found deer outside Desert Bluffs but he wasn’t interested. He did attack a Strexcorp employee but I called him back. Things going to get worse if I don’t get a regular source of human blood. Can’t use mine. The book says he’ll kill me._

_4/24_

_5 mg Klonopin_

_2.5 Ativan (administered at bed)_

_Pharmacist in Pine Cliffs won’t give me anymore benzos for “grandma.” I’ve also run through most of my Xanax. He talked about Compazine, which would be good. Anti-psychotic properties, more than Klonopin, but they conflict and will make him crazy. Bought emergency Benadryl. Will visit Desert Bluffs pharmacy tomorrow, try to get something out of them._

_4/26_

_5 mg Klonopin_

_0.5 mg Ativan (administered afternoon)_

_I hate Desert Bluffs. They are terrible. There is so much blood everywhere. Too much paperwork to get my drugs. I couldn’t fill it out without a better fake ID. Need to fine another source fast. Cecil getting too antsy. Read some scary stuff about the magnetic poles. It seems like it would be cool to go, but don’t know how I would get back if I lost Cecil._

_4/27_

_5 mg Klonopin_

_3 tablets Benadryl at night_

_Cecil attacked me again during walk. Doesn’t remember it, but he was antsy all day. Bendryl not strong enough. The book said not to strengthen the bldstone circle anymore. Can’t merge with Cecil yet. I won’t be in control. Stronger than I anticipated. Cecil Baldwin? Really?_

_4/28_

_10 mg Klonopin_

_Algonquin definitely watching me. He knows about my trips out of town. Fucker knows everything. I can take Cecil out at night, but I can’t control him when he’s awake. Not sure I can get him out of Night Vale undetected. Tried to buy tranquilizer gun like the one I had in pre-school. G-DDAMN WAITING PERIOD!_

 

When Cecil finished, he was crying. Not sobbing, just leaking tears silently. He looked at the empty water bottles. He took one of them under the brighter light of the bathroom, and he could see the residue left over from the drugs Dean was giving him. His hands were shaking because he was in withdrawal. Because Dean was missing. Had something happened to him? Was he trapped in Pine Cliffs – or worse, Desert Bluffs? If anything happened to him -

 _No, Cecil, you fucking moron,_ a voice said. _He’s not your friend. He’s never been your friend_.

Dean was the monster he kept attacking in his dreams.

 _He chained you up like a dog and left you to starve. He doesn’t deserve to live_.

Cecil hurled the book across the room and curled up into himself, crying into his lap while the one free tentacle stroked his hair. Like Dean would do, when he wanted to calm him down. When he could think – and he recognized now that he might be in agony but he could think clearly because for the first time in weeks, maybe months, he wasn’t on some kind of tranquilizer – he tried to go back to the beginning, to his first fight with Dean. It was over the chant that made him crazy. Yes, he’d done something terrible to Dean, but Dean promised never to use it again, and he did at the party. He said he was drunk but Cecil didn’t remember him drinking, and it was a big mistake to make while drunk.

Did Dean start the dreams or did they start on their own? He said he was still reading the book at the time, and said something about leading or guiding. Had Dean taken never let Cecil out of his sight? Had he continued planning from day one of their separation? He admitted in the journal that he was not in control, but that was much later. Every time Cecil wanted to get help, Dean said no. When Cecil didn’t want to mix bloodstones, Dean convinced him that it was necessary. Every out Cecil might have had, he wasted by listening to Dean instead. He didn’t want to hurt his friend.

He still didn’t.

 _He’s not your friend_.

He knew that, but he wasn’t killer. Not while he was awake he wasn’t. The thing he’d been letting himself become had so much power, but it couldn’t be harnessed. Not by him, and not with Dean’s help. He couldn’t let it destroy everything it touched.

Cecil tried to clean himself up in the bathroom, but it was a difficult job. His clothing was bloodstained. His visible limbs were covered in soars. He could wash his face, and he took time trying to get all of the blood out of his beard. He had a beard now, and a lot of hair because he’d given up on shaving. He looked every part the rabid beast Dean seemed to depict him as.

He wanted to wallow in shame but it was still itchy, still jumpy, and he had one last thing to check. He could get close enough to the altar to see what was on it and sense the bloodstones. They were in a circle, alternating between his and Dean’s. From a distance they appeared the same, but he did know a thing or two about bloodstone circles, and he could see how that he was focused that Dean’s were organized in the ascendant positions and Cecil’s were in the descendant positions. Dean had never meant to link them. He meant to dominate Cecil. Cecil shook his head; he had taken some of his orders so unquestioningly. He was _so stupid_. He looked around and recognized the pervasive set-up of everything in the room. The sigils on the doors had been changed some time ago. They weren’t keeping people out so much as keeping him in. Even if he was free of his chains, and the shackles around his legs, he wasn’t sure he could break the door open.

All of this knowledge didn’t help, of course. It made it worse. When Dean came back – if Dean _did_ come back – Ceil would have to fight him, and he was currently so weak that he would probably lose. He needed help.

He only knew one person – one being he could call on, and that was a stretch. It knew neither good nor evil. It knew both creation and destruction. It could destroy him and destroy the world.

Cecil was hurting. He knew he had suffered so much, and so much of it was his own fault, but he had to take responsibility for his actions, and accept the consequences. Still shaking back and forth, rattling his chains and causing his collar to prick deep into his neck, he began the long chant. He knew it from the book – he’d never used it, and neither had Dean, but it jumped right into his head and stayed there.

“ _Ygnail hey, ygnaii hey, Thalthkh nagtha_ ,” he began to chant. Almost on cue, he heard the door to the airs open, but he didn’t turn away from the altar. “ _Yib'thynk hey_ – “

“Cecil! What the hell are you doing?”

What the hell he was doing was trying to stand so tall and straight in front of the altar that he could feel the insides of the collar ripping at his throat while his one free tentacle swung wildly at the tune. “ _Yib’thinky hey ... Yog-Sothoth!_ ”

_Father, help me!_

He was unprepared for the unbridled power that came coursing through him. New blood was bursting from his veins and he burst from his restraints as he turned to look at Dean. Dean, who was wearing a bandage around his head and holding a Styrofoam banana sundae, who still had the dull eyes of reeducation, and did not move quickly enough as two massive tentacles sprung forth from Cecil’s body and wrapped themselves around him – one at his legs, the other across his chest, and lifted him into the air.

"Cecil! Stop!”

He recognized the order as it bounced off him and what was left of Cecil Baldwin at that moment smiled.

 _Yes. This all must end_.

The smile widened and he tore Dean Curwen in half.


	9. Despair

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This ended up being my favorite chapter to re-read. I don't know why that is.

Chapter 9

2013

Carlos said very little when Cecil spoke. The story that emerged was very hesitant and very stripped of detail. Carlos could fill them in for himself and now was not the time to push his boyfriend, who was still saw raw and yet trying to stay removed from a situation that had happened so long ago and so many people had helped him forget. Carlos most badly wanted to tell Cecil not to blame himself even though Cecil was doing it anyway, but he knew when a situation was unapproachable. Cecil wanted to be left alone to get ready for the broadcast, and Carlos only spent a few seconds pondering out loud if Cecil could take a vacation day. Cecil would never do that. He went on the air, on that very faint signal, and gave the show his best even if it was noticeably muted.

Carlos drove him home. Cecil did not talk in the car. He did not need to ask for his space, even if what he really wanted was headspace. They picked up at Rico’s and over dinner he read the last of Al’s letters, handing them to Carlos before retreating to the bedroom.

Carlos felt guilty as he picked them up, but maybe Cecil was happier if Al told Carlos. He didn’t like to see Cecil retreating into himself, but his objections could wait another day.

_Cecil,_

_This part of the story is a little easier for me to construct, though what was actually happening to you is still a lot of guesswork. Eight months passed between the last time I saw you and the incident in the canyon, though you remained at your job for another two months before being fired, and I have to conclude that you disappeared soon after that._

_Our relationship had bee deteriorating for some time. I shamefully thought it was the usual combination of boredom and anxiety that was putting you in a permanent bad mood. You were given to periods of insomnia so when you always seemed tired I didn’t think enough of it. You told me you wanted me out of your life and I decided to respect that. You were an adult and you could make your own decisions, and you seemed to have a lot on your mind. If I could go back now during any part of my life and undo something, I would have worked to keep that relationship open so I could tell when you were pushing me away and when you were really, without your own knowledge, asking for help._

            ****************************************

1996

Algonquin was making notes on the day’s broadcast when an intern entered with another notice from the Sheriff’s Secret Police. Al was not, under any circumstances, to mention John Peter’s missing animals or the dead remains found near the exit to Route 800. The wording was precise enough for Al to read between the lines. Something was going on in Night Vale and they weren’t sure what it was. They would rather have him think it was a planned event of some kind, but he knew it was going on too long for anything planned, and he’d already spoken to John about his cattle and the damage to his property. He wouldn’t say anything on the radio but he made a note of it in another journal. That was six known events this month, and it was only the fifteenth. There were three additional ones just beyond the town line with Desert Bluffs that either the police didn’t know about or didn’t want to comment on at all. That was right at the end of his vision.

All the attacks happened at night. Al decided to stay late. He remained in his booth after the broadcast switched to maple syrup inconsistently dripping into a pail, and when it was late enough, he cautiously switched on the microphone. He sat further back than usual so it wouldn’t catch his breath. It took a few minutes to fully focus before he opened his third eye. Amplified by the station, he could remain in his body but see every part of Night Vale. He went over it slowly, careful not to give himself a headache and lose concentration. Most people were in their beds, pretending to sleep. He had enough sense not to go into the bedrooms of people who were awake. The police were watching them anyway. He could see the police to, in bushes and high up in trees and in camouflage on balconies. The only pizza shop still open was Big Rico’s because Rico was a giant preying mantis and didn’t need a lot of sleep. Al could find almost anyone. Some were out of town on errands, and he didn’t bother keeping track of everyone. He had no need. But as his Eye swung around the Desert Cliffs area he noticed the Curwen house was empty again, as it was every night. The thought of where Dean could possibly be tickled something in his brain. He hadn’t left town permanently and yet Al had yet to find him. If he was going out of town every night, the police would have made a note of it.

It stuck in his brain as he continued his search for unusual movements and he decided to break a promise and look in on Cecil. “No spying on me,” Cecil said over their final, tense conversation. But was it really fair to give Cecil an exemption? Al took a harmless look, then focused when he noticed the apartment was empty. He swung back to the various bars, regular and underground, but found nothing. In fact, focusing on _Cecil_ – which was something he rarely did, as it exhausted him – brought him out to the scrublands and still left him without anyone in sight.

Al broke off the signal and switched the microphone off. His head was splitting and he couldn’t focus his eyes. He laid down on the floor of the darkened studio and remained their for some time, waiting for the migraine to subside. When he could think again, he contemplated calling the police and asking about Curwen, which would at least put him on a watch list, but more likely it would just make them angry at him. If they had anything, he would know about it.

He slept in the studio that night, cushioned by a lot of back fur, and waited until the sun was out to begin his walkabout and reorient himself to normal vision. He did not go right to Cecil’s – he went instead to the Night Vale Daily Journal, only to learn Cecil had been fired months ago.

“He wrote an editorial that put him in reeducation. And almost put me there too,” the editor said. She had never cared for Cecil.

“What was it about?”

“I’m not telling you!” Which was a surprise, because normally she did tell him what he wanted to know. “It was all in another language, and I had to burn it. Not on the office altar. I had to take it outside, burn it, then bury the ashes. I don’t know what the hell it was about but I’m not asking.”

“When was this?”

“I don’t know – like four months ago?”

Four months? How had that much time passed? “Have you seen him since?”

“No, and I don’t want to see him.” She softened after that statement. “Look, he’s a good kid, and he has talent. We’ve been starving for a decent copy-editor since he left and I would have to hire him back on that alone. But he wasn’t happy here, and he didn’t exactly leave kicking and screaming. So no, he hasn’t come crawling back for his job like he used to. I haven’t thought about it much. I guess I assumed he was working for you.”

Al shook his head. “Does he have a cell phone I don’t know about? I need to get in touch with him.”

“ _You_ can’t get in touch with him?” She rolled her eyes. “Then he must be on the other side of the planet.”

But Al was sure Cecil hadn’t left Night Vale. He checked with City Hall, and no, Cecil hadn’t even applied for a permit. He had never expressed a desire to leave Night Vale. He had nowhere in particular to go outside of Night Vale.

That didn’t stop Al from calling Dakota in Desert Bluffs. “Have you seen any unusual traffic from Night Vale?”

“As in, people still alive?” Dakota was always a little harsh on the phone, but she did answer his questions. “Or are you just looking for body parts?”

“Come on.”

“Sorry, Al. Just the usual lost tourists, or tourists fleeing Night Vale, or people trying to raid our pharmacies for narcotics and meth supplies. Strexcorp put a stop to that. It asks for a lot of paperwork now.”

The first two things he did know about. “Wait, what? People from Night Vale are making meth?”

“Welcome to the 20th century,” she said, and he could almost hear her roll her eyes. And she sounded so nice on the radio. “It’s the behind-the-counter stuff they get stuck on. Uppers, downers. Like our pharmacist has never seen a fake prescription pad before.”

“This happens a lot?”

“Not all the time. It just happened recently. Seems you don’t have some very happy citizens if they want anti-psychotics so badly. Why aren’t you putting it in the water supply yet?”

“Are you talking about a specific person?”

She sounded like she was shuffling through something. “Yeah, I have a public announcement about it. A young Night Valian seems very unsatisfied. If you see him, please give him a hug! It’s the least we can do for visitors to our fair city! Like that. I’m reading it tonight.”

“Does it give his description?”

“Including it is optional, but short, dark-haired, mid-twenties? That’s very vague.”

It narrowed the pool of two to one. “Thank you.”

“Anything else? I want to keep my subversive conversations to a minimal today.”

“Watch your back.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “I had eyes installed there.”

Al sighed and hung up. He always felt a shiver in his spine when on the phone with someone in Desert Bluffs, even someone he (vaguely) knew. It felt good to get some air after that. At the Ralph’s he was fortunate to run into Earl Harlan, who was trying to herd a pack of young scouts down the dairy aisle without having them make off with everything in sight.

“I haven’t seen Cecil in months,” Earl told him. “I assumed – I don’t know what I assumed. That he working. Or was drinking himself into a stupor again.” He said it with real concern, but also a friend who was a little familiar with existential crisis’s and where they tended to lead, so it was a part of life for him. “We’re not always on great terms.”

“Were you on great terms last time you saw him?”

“We weren’t on bad terms. He just seemed really distracted.” Earl never took his eyes off the kids, two of whom he was dragging along by their arms. Their pockets were stuffed with candy.

“Did he mention Dean Curwen?”

“No.” Earl gave him a look. “Should he have?”

“Just key on eye out for either of them,” Al said, not wanting to alarm him. Earl could easily get riled up about Cecil.

From there he went to Cecil’s apartment. The key instead the fake rock was missing, but Cecil had a habit of forgetting who he lent his spare keys to so it was easy enough to get in. Mail was in a pile at the foot of the door where the slot would put it. There was a layer on dust on everything, and Cecil’s bike was missing. More tellingly, the bike chain wasn’t. It was hanging on the door handle to the closet, and was not the sort of thing Cecil would leave behind. Everything pointed to Cecil leaving town except for the bike chain.

It took Al several days to track down Dean Curwen. He was almost never at home, even at night. Al finally spotted him from the studio when his car returned to Night Vale via Route 800, from destinations unknown. Al dashed out of the booth, managing to be at Dean’s doorstep before the owner was. But he did not recognize him because he was not looking at the Dean Curwen he remembered. Dean was self-righteous and ambitious, and perhaps a bit amoral. That was how he had been all of his life until this point, when Al saw him anew and he saw nothing but a gooey black substance in the form of Dean, and only after Dean started speaking to him did he realize that it was the same person.

“ – on my porch?”

Al shook his head and forced his Eye closed. Yes, it was Dean, his usual impatient self. “I’m looking for Cecil.”

Dean rolled his eyes. He was carrying grocery bags. “And?”

“Have you seen him?”

“Considering you were the fucker who told him we couldn’t be friends, what makes you think I have?” Dean spat back. “I know it was you.”

“I’m not denying it.” He tried to focus on Dean’s expression to see if he was lying, which he was usually good at doing, but was distracted by the bottomless prism of evil he was staring into. “I’ll ask again. _Have you seen Cecil?_ ”

“Don’t pull that Voice bullshit on me!” Dean’s eyes flared at him. “If it’s not related to the show it’s a misdemeanor.”

So. He was lying. Bt they both knew that, really. And they knew that the other person knew. “Where are you keeping him?”

“Maybe he doesn’t want to see you. Maybe you’re just not the focus of his life anymore. He’s moved on to better things then the guy who reads City Council announcements and plays the weather. Either way, it’s none of my business, and you have no business being here. So get lost.”

Al could have strangled the little shit right there but he was too afraid to touch him. Something awful had happened to Dean, but he had a point. Breaking into his house – especially when Al could see it perfectly fine from his radio station – wouldn’t exactly help the situation. “This isn’t over. This won’t be over until I find Cecil.”

“Maybe he’ll find you.”

Partially because the officer from the bush was watching and abusing the Voice was a misdemeanor, Al tightened himself up inside and left. He could follow Dean from afar. Dean would lead him to Cecil, he reassured himself. Sooner or later, he would find them.

And yet that did not seem to happen. Dean could drop off the map, as if he had a portal in his house that went somewhere. He did not make anymore trips out of town, perhaps aware that Al was watching him. Al couldn’t devote every spare moment to using his Eye and still be able to broadcast. He had to do the show; he always had to do the show. He could schedule a vacation day but he wouldn’t have access to the microphone if he wasn’t at work.

He was embarrassed how long it took him to think of it, but eventually he drove out to John Peter’s farm. “Cattle are gone again?”

John was surveying the destruction of his blood-soaked field. “The city’ll replace ‘em, but damn, the fence is torn up. It wouldn’t take much beyond that to take my roof off. Police were all hush-hush about it.” He turned to Al. “Don’t suppose you know anything about it.”

Something was wrong in Night Vale. Something was here that had gotten past all the barriers that protected the city and yet still remained off the police’s radar. They knew about it, but they didn’t know what it was, where it came from, or how to stop it. “I wish I did.” He made a cautious step into the overturned turf. “John, you once told me that people do not change their true identities.”

“That’s a generalization. They do a little bit, over time,” John explained. “When they’re babies it takes some time for the person to form. They’re just little balls of light. But otherwise, no.”

“What if I told you I saw someone who was completely different?”

“It’s too central to the person’s spirit,” John said, shaking his head. “Of course, people can be corrupted by an outside force, and they can be purified. But there’s not a lot on this earth that does it. Humans, we’re sensitive creatures, but we are attuned to the energies of the planet, so we’re used to them. We build up immunities.” He kicked at the soil. “This about Dean Curwen? He wasn’t lookin’ so hot when I saw him at the Safeway last month.”

Al nodded. “He’s hiding Cecil somewhere I can’t see, but there isn’t supposed to be anything I can’t see in Night Vale. I don’t know what to do.”

“They way he’s lookin’, this thing’ll resolve itself,” John said, meaning Dean’s death. “But yer sure it involves Cecil?”

“It’s not going to kill him, but yes. I need to find him. Wherever he is, he needs help.” Cecil was not going to die because Cecil was going to be the Voice of Night Vale, but Al couldn’t tell John things he saw beyond time. “I’ve already searched Dean’s house and I don’t know where else to look. The violence has all been at night – it’s got to be connected – but it’s always on the edge on Night Vale, or beyond the city limits.”

“Someone knows what they’re doin’. Can yew report him?”

“The police will know I don’t have anything on Dean, and I can’t afford a reputation for false reports.” He didn’t care if the police officer on John’s property was listening. “I just know something’s wrong. Something’s gone terribly wrong here.”

“Tell that to my new cattle,” John said, gesturing to the gory field. “Al, a storm’s a-comin’, and the best thing you can do now is be ready when it comes.” As if John was a prophet, the wind picked up, blowing loose hay around.

So Al prepared. He rested and waited. He tried to track Dean, but he didn’t come up until he popped up in the new headquarters of the Sheriff’s Secret Police in the abandoned mine just outside of town. Al burned rubber getting there.

There was a very nice reception area, with air conditioning and good lighting. “What’s Curwen in for?”

The officer looked at him numbly and said, “Reeducation.” It was Mitchell, a younger recruit.”

“For what?”

“You know we can’t tell you that, Mr. Algonquin,” Mitchell said very respectfully, obviously a little intimidated by Al’s stature alone. He barely fit in the room.

“Curwen knows where Cecil Baldwin is,” Al explained. “And if they’re in there erasing his memories, we might never get that information.”

“I can, uh, go in the back, and ask them for you. Can you take a seat?”

Al could not actually take a seat. They were too small. But he managed to squeeze into something to make a suitable impression. Mitchell was not long, and he came bearing a sheet he would not let Al see. “He’s in for visiting Desert Bluffs to buy Benadryl. They’re removing his memories of the trip and putting in aversion therapy for visiting the town. Nothing else.”

“Did you ask about Cecil?”

“He’s not really in a condition to be asked anything right now, and won’t be until the procedure is finished.” Meaning they probably had his skull open. “I’m sorry. That’s all I can give you, sir.”

“I want a call when he’s released.”

“Technically that’s private information.”

“Fine.” He’d find out on his own. “But if he mentions Cecil, you have to report it to me. It’s important to my broadcast.” He couldn’t explain how, but the recruit probably knew better than to question him on this. Or was just afraid to.

And so he sat on his hands again (or paws, really) and was deep in a broadcast several days later when Dean was actually released. He had little time to think on this, as he was quickly distracted by the explosion in Desert Cliffs.

            ****************************************

Al didn’t need to be told it was Dean’s house. They weren’t reporting the precise location (and it was hard to tell, because it was night and now the entire row of houses were on fire) but Al mustered his interns and sent them all over with station cell phones and orders to report everything they saw – except for Larry Leroy, who was brand new, and deserved to live through at least one day on the job.

Initially he reported with the information he was given by the police because he didn’t have anything else or time to use his Eye. There were evacuation orders to be carefully read and disseminated. Citizens needed places to flee to safety that weren’t likely to be trampled by some massive, unknown and only partially-visible force tearing apart the streets with a horrible screeching. There was at least one report of a man with his eardrums burst and his eyes torn out, so the police were probably taking their time assessing the situation.

Within an hour the chaos of cars and buildings tossed aside by an invisible force had engulfed the west side of Night Vale, and Al grabbed the microphone for a rare on-the-scene broadcast because he could not stop talking but he could also not stay there any longer. He wasn’t in any danger in the station, but Station Management sure sounded mad and he decided to chance a quick escape. He talked as he ran, trying to keep his voice calm and make it seem as if his running into danger was for Night Vale’s good, and maybe it was. He lost track of that, repeating the same evacuation codes over and over as he ignored the actual path of destruction and drove straight to Dean Curwen’s house. He had to abandon his car at Big Ricos because the pavement was torn up beyond that.

“Good citizens, I am now traveling into the heart of the chaos, reporting live on the scene with my team of loyal interns,” he said, which was a lie. The area was still on fire, but no one was combating it and the houses were burning rather quickly.

Except for the Curwen house, ancient by Night Vale standards. It was gone entirely. “And now I give you the weather,” he said and switched off the microphone, not caring if the weather actually played or not as he approached the house – or what should have been the house. It was entirely gone, uprooted from the inside and pieces of it could be found on the burning roofs of nearby houses or in chunks on the straight. Only the bottom floor remained, torn in parts and definitely unsafe to walk on except where there was still standing furniture. Al opened his Eye, and saw no one was inside.

Except there was a hole in the floor, and it went somewhere. The house did not have a basement he could see and yet he was definitely looking at a basement. The stairs were mercifully intact even if the door leading to it was torn off.

Despite the heat around him, Al felt a chill as he descended the steps and saw what remained of Dean Curwen at the bottom of them – or the bottom half of Dean Curwen, anyway, just part of a torso and legs. Al didn’t devote much time to him. All around him was the smell of human blood and an uncomfortable humming sound. Everywhere he stepped there were broken chains, bloodied clothing, and empty containers of food. Only the altar was fully intact – an altar with two sets of bloodstones. Even he couldn’t get near it, overwhelmed by fear and what remained of his sense of self-preservation. The instruments were kicked to the side and the altar cloth had fallen off, but the circle was intact and the stones were still glowing.

“Cecil.” He said it not to call anyone out – Cecil was long gone now – but in despair. He would have cried but he was afraid to cry in this hidden room so evil that it must have had the power to blot itself from Night Vale itself. The chains, the empty bottles of water, the filthy mattress told him everything he really didn’t want to know. “Oh, Cecil.”

He never felt like more of a failure in his life, but he knew he had to leave this room, even if some wrongs would remain un-righted. He couldn’t fathom staying any longer. He needed to hold on to the handrail to steady himself for the climb up and into the heat of the melting street. He managed to get some distance for stopping to rest, and he finally opened his Eye once more. He didn’t have the station equipment, but he had Randolph’s microphone, and he saw Cecil perfectly, and he did not like what he saw. Inside, Cecil was the same – covered in corruption but essentially Cecil, even if very little of him as Al knew him was still functioning. Al could see what the real him, and when he shut his Eye he saw what he currently looked like, if only as a glimmer, and that was enough.

As Al watched the police prepare for battle, his anger only grew. Night Vale was supposed to _protect_ Cecil from all of this. He was more than just a citizen. He was a refugee from a world that would have both rejected and twisted him. He didn’t know this was why he had never left, but Al never told him, and now Al was more angry at himself.

By the time he actually reached the Sheriff himself, Cecil had destroyed the bowling alley, the motel, torn apart Grove Park and the Owl Observatory, and was only now being herded away from settled areas with a barrage of bullets and bombs being dropped on him from helicopters above. Occasionally a tentacle would slap at them and swat them out of the sky like flies.

“Sheriff!” Al barged past the junior officers. “Sheriff, you have to listen to me.”

“Oh really?” The Sheriff, as usual, was out of patience for Al. “What are you going to do? Talk it to death?”

“It’s not an ‘it.’ It’s Cecil! Cecil Baldwin! That thing you’re shooting at is a citizen of Night Vale!”

“Well, darn! I guess we’ll just let him rampage then,” the Sheriff said. “Al, if you’re even right, that citizen has taken out almost half of our town in an hour. Right now I have to put the other citizens first while they’re still some left. This is not radio; it’s real life. So get back to your booth while we save the town.” He tilted his head at two officers to escort Al away from the planning area. In the end, it took three.

Al wouldn’t tell them this, but he could see Cecil a lot better than they could, even with his Eye closed. The form was mostly invisible and disgusting, mostly tentacles and screaming mouths floating in the air, but he saw every shimmer. Cecil was, understandably, upset. 

They were driving further into the scrublands. The bombs didn’t seem to be hurting him, but were effective in herding him towards Radon Canyon. The radiation there wasn’t enough to kill a person but –

“No!” He saw the City Council – the _City Council_ – outside, talking with the Sheriff in his new position at the entrance to the canyon, and he saw the missile in the launcher. He practically tackled the police officers in riot gear to get himself to that meeting. “No, you can’t do this! You can’t launch that at a _person_.”

The Sheriff didn’t hesitate to point in Cecil’s direction and said, “In case you haven’t noticed, that thing is not a person. Now get out of here. You don’t have proper radiation shielding. In fact, for your own safety – “ He snapped his fingers and several men appeared. “Detain the Voice of Night Vale.”

Their faces were set in grim determination that made Al aware that he would have to kill them to get past them, essentially, and he wasn’t willing to do that. But nor was he willing to watch Cecil die –

_Cecil isn’t going to die. Cecil is the next Voice of Night Vale._

He sighed and tried to let this knowledge soothe him but it wouldn’t even for a moment, as they dragged him behind the blast shield.

_I’m not wrong I’m not wrong I’m not_

They told him to shield his eyes, and covered him with their own bodies when he wouldn’t. The blast was deafening anyway and the sky turned an awful color around the mushroom cloud. There was an eerie silence, but no more movement from the valley.

The officers’ hold on him was tight and it lasted a long time. He sobbed quietly into the dirt beneath him. Cecil was not dead; there was no way Cecil could be dead. Or maybe he just wouldn’t stay that way? Either way, Al had failed him.

“Sir?” It was the voice of an intern.

He pulled himself together. “Take the mic, but don’t use it under _any circumstances_.” He grabbed body armor, which presumably had lead shielding because everyone was wearing it, and tore across the wasteland. The air still crackled with radiation and a cloud had settled in the sky above the small valley made of red stone. He knew the air he was breathing was bad, but he could not stop.

And then he saw Cecil.

It had been Cecil and he could see the real Cecil, but ordinary eyes would not. He was more of a puddle than a person, a melting less of eyes and limbs forever reassembling themselves but with less and less energy each time. But he was still moving, if only to desperately try to transform into something which could live and breathe.

“ _Cecil_ ,” he called out, summoning every part of the Voice. “ _Cecil Gershwin Baldwin_.”

And from somewhere, a tremble and a low moan that sounded like several organs slapping together.

“ _Cecil_ ,” Al said, coming closer to where most of the eyes were. “It’s Al. Algonquin. _Come back to me_.”

There was another moan, softer this time, as if the creature realized it was just too hard to respond every time.

“Cecil, _come back to me_ ,” he ordered. “ _Listen. You don’t feel any pain. You are yourself again. You are mixed up but you will be your old self. You will feel human limbs and think human thoughts. You are not in any pain._ ” When the resounding but weak cry told him that no, Cecil was in agony and Al could not change that, or trick him into otherwise, Al collapsed to his knees beside him. “Oh Cecil. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

Al kept calling out to him, repeating his name over and over with and without the Voice, using his Eye to search for the person in the monster. “Cecil, you’re twenty-seven years old. Your mother was human. You look like her. You have two arms and two limbs and a torso and a beautiful head of hair. You have lived in Night Vale all your life.” He choked back a sob. “We have known each other since you were a baby. I promised your mother I would take care of you. I would have adopted you but the Voice of Night Vale can’t be a single parent. And you are still my son even if you have another thing to call father.” He took what looked like a more solid appendage and held it. It had suckers that dug into his hand and drew blood but he didn’t stop them. “You are the only son I’ve ever had. You have been some of the best years of my past, you are my present, and you will be my future. You will be great in more ways than you can imagine, and I will be _so_ proud of you.” 

The form had stopped shifting around and seemed to be retreating into a smaller and smaller mess.

“ _Come back to me_ ,” he commanded, because Cecil needed that pull. Cecil was so far away from him. He needed an authority figure to call him back. “I will never abandon you again. Cecil, I love you.”

He heard a moan, this one that sounded more human than the others. Cecil’s head was taking shape, even if it was full of eyes and lacking hair. It was head-sized at least. Cecil was small enough that Al could cradle him in his arms and the rest of Cecil’s gooey body could spill out onto the canyon floor. There was enough solidity to hold on to even if some still fell between his fingers.

“I promise you,” he pleaded, “I will do everything I can to take this pain away from you. I won’t leave you alone. Just please, please come back to me.” And untainted, he wanted to say, but Cecil seemed to have shed what taint he might have had, because he was not consumed by blackness. He was Cecil, and coming closer to looking like him.

When he was stiffer and more solid, and no longer dripping, Al stopped trying to breathe in the canyon. He stood up and carried Cecil out, making the long trip up a dirt hill that burned the bottom of his feet (he could no longer wear shoes) with heat and radiation. Cecil was so light, almost as if he was made of ether and not flesh. By the time Al reached the outer parameter, Cecil was person-sized again. Al climbed over the barrier and walked passed the squabbling City Council and the burning buildings. He ignored the entireties from those who had shoved him off so recently.

And there was his intern, badly burned and probably dying of radiation poisoning, with his microphone. “The storm has passed, listeners,” he said into it. “We are back, and we are alive. Stay indoors, hug your remaining family members, and be grateful. Good night, Night Vale.” He turned it off, as only he could manipulate it. She was actually holding it in a box, not touching the actual mic. “Take it back to the station. Tell Management I’m taking a vacation day.” With all the radiation she had taken, it was probably better for a quick end anyway. “You did good work today, Intern Stacy.”

“Thank you, sir.” She smiled and ran off and he watched her go off to her death happy and fulfilled, more than he could say of a lot of people.

The Sheriff finally had the courage to approach him. “I’m going to take care of him,” Al explained. He knew the hospital might not be safe for him or the other patients. “I’ll send for some medical equipment.”

“We’re going to need to work on him. You realize we’re going to have to reeducate the whole city.”

Al nodded. He did not feel particularly gracious to the man who had just sent a nuclear missile into Cecil’s body. “I’ll keep him out of sight. Give me a few days and then start your work.”

The Sheriff looked at Cecil, with his extra eyes and overlong limbs. “Yeah.”

“Some day, Night Vale will need him,” Al said with as much authority as he could muster without the Voice.

“I sure hope you’re right.”

Al knew he had never been less wrong in his life.


	10. Fallout

Chapter 10

1996

Al needed help. He wrapped Cecil up in the blanket from his trunk and drove him home, depositing him on the sofa after covering it with a plastic drop cloth. He called the hospital first, then Josie. She was newly-retired but still licensed to practice medicine.

Every moment until she arrived was agonizing. “He’s having trouble breathing,” he told her. Cecil’s breathes sounded like he was pulling air through a rusty pipe. “The hospital won’t take him, but they’re sending supplies.”

Josie checked his pulse – it was amazing that she found it – and said, “Who is this?”

Al belatedly realized he hadn’t specified over the phone. “Cecil.”

“ _This_ is Cecil Baldwin?”

He nodded, hoping he wouldn’t have to explain.

Josie straightened up. “You have to shave everything.” She gestured to his coat. “You’re tracking in radioactive particles on your fur. You’ll ruin the whole house. Shave everything off and put it in a plastic bag, and the city will have to dispose of it.”

“That’s going to take a long time.”

“I’ll help. Just go get started.” She certainly could still speak with the authority of a nurse. Al did a rather quick, botched job with every part of his body that he could properly reach. He knew it would be back tomorrow. In the early days of his career, when he still resembled a human being, he would shave it for social events, but Management was very persistent at mocking him. Underneath – well, he tried not to look in the mirror too long to see the human who was so disfigured. Arms too long, jaw too wide, horns poking out of his skull.

By the time he had done what he could and bandaged up the many nicks and cuts, the equipment had arrived and Cecil was hooked to an IV and oxygen mask. Josie helped him shave the last of his fur and bag it. Cecil needed to be bathed as quickly as possible. He still had no hair and one extra eye, this one behind his ear, and his breaths were still ragged.

“One of his lungs is in the wrong place,” Josie said. She was not the least bit phased, of course. She wouldn’t have survived her tenure at Night Vale General if she was susceptible to eldritch horror. “We’ll give him extra oxygen so he doesn’t have to work as hard until it finds his way back. Has he been conscious at all?”

Al shook his head.

“You should take an iodine pill,” she told him. From there they went about setting up a plastic-sheeted room out of the guest room to protect it from the radiation Cecil’s body was emitting. It was almost dawn when they got him in the tub, and he seemed to be back in a human composition, just hairless. The IV was iodine and sugar water. If he was unconscious for more than a few days he would need a feeding tube, Josie said.

Al stayed awake long after she was gone, sitting by Cecil’s bedside and feeling naked despite wearing clothes he hadn’t been able to put on in a decade and a lead shield vest. The air felt strange on his skin. When he was too tired to talk, he found a cassette of one of his old shows, the ones he stored in his apartment so the police wouldn’t erase them, and set it to play in the boom bed stand. He fell asleep to his own voice.

            ****************************************

Aside from Josie’s visit the next day, no one bothered him. In fact, no one dared to come to his house. Al knew he couldn’t take another day off. He needed to read announcements explaining whatever spin the mayor wanted to put on Night Vale’s near-destruction. And despite his own inclinations, he needed to sleep sometime, too.

After a long mental search, one person did come to line, and he called him. “Hello, Earl. This is Algonquin. I need your help.”

“My help?” Earl Harlan’s voice jumped a few octaves.

“With Cecil.” Al wasn’t sure exactly how far the rumors had spread, or how correct they were, or what the sheriff’s secret police was doing about them yet. “I know you took your Blood Oath with him in scouts. He doesn’t need much, just someone to watch his vitals while he’s unconscious. But I have to do the show.”

“Cecil is …” Earl’s voice trailed off. Al did not know what he was imagining but he clearly knew something. “I d-don’t know what I can do.”

Al sighed. “You were Eagle scouts together.”

“Yeah, but – “

“Earl Harlan,” Al said dramatically, “ _Will no one help the widow’s son?_ ”

Earl could not refuse. His blood would boil. Literally. “I-I’m sorry. I’ll come right over. I’ve just been a little freaked out over the last few days. We lost about half our troops, and some of them are still missing and – I should stop rambling. I’m coming.” He hung up the phone before Al could get another world in.

Ten minutes later, the Earl that arrived was sans-uniform and a little more put together. He was shocked to see Cecil in the makeshift observation room. “What happened to his hair?” Amazingly, that was technically the only thing wrong with Cecil’s appearance other than his ashen skin.

“Long story,” Al said, handing him a lead vest. “He was right in the middle of it, so he’s very radioactive. Don’t bring anything in here you want to keep. Nurse Josie said it might be a few days or weeks before he wakes up, though you should call if he does. Otherwise, there’s not much to do. The machines will beep if something is off. I’ve been playing old tapes for him, but if you want to talk to him, he might appreciate that. It’s hard to say, really.”

“What should I talk about?”

“Anything. Read the phone book if you want. He just ... needs to be called back to us. He traveled too far away.”

Earl nodded; he knew not to question it.

            ****************************************

Despite his initial, fear-based hesitation, Earl was true to his scout honor and stayed at Cecil’s side every minute that Al was at the station or asleep. He read to him from municipally-approved books that he said were Cecil’s favorites. He was very slow to ask what had happened, and did it well out of earshot.

“Dean Curwin is dead,” Al said in response to the question about Cecil. “He got Cecil involved in something he shouldn’t have. When Cecil recovers, the police will take his memories away from – and you. They’re doing it to the whole town. It’s for the best.”

“So that thing in Desert Cliffs – “

“- Was not Cecil was you know him, but Cecil as Dean made him.”

Earl ended his line of questioning there. He had survived so long in Night Vale – and as an assistant scoutmaster – because he knew where his knowledge should end.

Cecil opened his eyes a week in, but he did not speak. He remained in a state of confusion, as if his pile of rational questions and memories were hidden beneath a massive weight. He started to say words – names, mostly, and requests for things like water and food, and whenever Al said anything he listened with eyes full of excitement as if he was being offered manna from heaven. They managed to eek out that he knew who he was, and where he was, but not why he was here or what had happened to him. Frankly, Al thought the last part was a mercy.

Soon Cecil was walking around, feeding himself, and finally showering by himself. His hair was back, though all of it was grey. He was not allowed to leave the house by order of the Sheriff, and there was a very polite guard posted on the porch because Cecil still had a tendency to get confused. His eyes would sink into his skull and he would be looking at something far in the distance, maybe beyond the solar system. This notion would hold him captive and he sometimes had to be shaken out of it, but his refractory period improved over time. When he asked, Al just told him he’d been sick, and Al was taking care of him.

Earl hung around longer than he technically needed to be there, which made Cecil happy. Al felt like it would be inappropriate to stop it, but he did feel bad for Earl, who was so in love with Cecil, who would never quite toy with him but would not return the affection. The time together made them closer, but it was only temporary. They would take most of Earl’s memories and all of Cecil’s. They took Cecil first because there was more work to do and they were eager to do it. Al drove Earl home that night, and the young future scoutmaster was crying quietly in the car.

“I know this is hard for you,” Al said, “but you did something for him no one else could have done.”

Earl wiped his nose and didn’t say anything else.

****************************************

After three days Al paid a visit to the abandoned mine shaft. He knew the Sheriff would rather meet in a different office, but Al was nervous and wanted to see Cecil.

“Don’t speak when you’re in the room,” the technician said. “He’s anesthetized, but we still don’t want to risk any interruptions.” With that they respectfully let him into the OR, where Cecil was strapped to a chair with the top of his skull removed, his head shrouded in a halo of blue sanitary tissue paper. They did it with a small electrical rod that gave off a brief spark when it touched brain matter. Al had to work at withholding comment. He felt torn apart as he met the Sheriff in the main office.

“We don’t know when this started, or how it started,” the Sheriff said. Al didn’t tell him about the book he’d seen or the altar with mixed bloodstones. If the police couldn’t do their job, then stronger forces than them were at work. “So we’re taking everything from when he started his job at the Journal. His résumé will stand but it will be redacted.”

“That’s more than five years. You’re in violation of city ordinances.”

“There’s been a lot of that going around,” the Sheriff said. He would not relent. “You have a plan to plug this hole?”

“Half a decade is not a ‘hole,’” Al said. “But yes. I’m sending him to Europe with a friend.”

The Sheriff raised an eyebrow.

“The Night Valian Europe,” Al clarified. “Time is even harder to track there than it is here. When he returns he probably won’t be able to tell how long he was gone.” And Cecil deserved to get out of Night Vale and out from under the oppressive thumb of its governments and watch groups.

“I need him gone at least a year.”

"Done.”

“And he’s going to have to be reeducated when it comes back. Nothing major, just the normal re-integration procedure. By then we will have gone through everyone so that just leaves the house.”

“What house?”

“The Curwen house, obviously. It re-constructed itself the next day. We’ve torn it down twice already, but it comes back. I had people go through, close it up, tear down any photos and remove all the things that show who lived there, but that’s all we seem to be able to do at the moment.”

So he really didn’t know about the basement. Al debated enlightening him, but he sensed it wouldn’t help. He knew the time wasn’t right. “Let me know if I can help you.”

“Just don’t mention it on your program. Ever. Don’t mention the _name_ Curwen to anybody, ever. The Councilman’s already changed his.” The Sheriff pointed to Al’s head. “I don’t you would sit with us for a session? For the safety of the town?”

“No,” Al replied definitively. “Someday, the town’s going to need this information. Let’s just hope it’s not soon.”

            ****************************************

2013

_What else can I say to you? That I tried to do my very best but still am thinking I should have done more? Even now, with everything in the past and all the preparations set for my departure, this matter will remain unsettled._

_You’ll find a way forward. I know you will. That’s not me seeing the world without time. That is simply my faith in you._

_And if the Sheriff hassles you about any of this, or hassles a friend or loved one, tell him I told you where he hides his Philosopher’s Stone. That always shuts him up._

_Love,_

_Algonquin_

_The Voice of Night Vale_

 

“It’s incredible, isn’t it? Cecil said, startling Carlos, who didn’t know he was in the room. “Everything he did for me, and I couldn’t begin to thank him when I had the chance.”

“I’m sure he understood.” Carlos set the letters down and waited for Cecil to rejoin him at the table. Cecil’s face was unreadable.

“I need to tell my brother. I need his help.”

“Please say you mean Tom.”

Cecil rolled his eyes. “Do you know anyone better for the job?”

“We could try without him. We should – “

“ _No_.” Cecil’s voice gained a fierce certainty. “It’s as if Night Vale kept that house asleep until I found someone I needed. Someone perfect for the job.” Though he didn’t seem that concerned that Carlos remained unconvinced, he added, “He deserves to know some of it anyway. He would tell me anything I wanted to know.”

“That book – “

“I know, I know, he wants it. But let me talk to him first. I ... have to tell him things.” Cecil didn’t make it clear what part of his experiences he wanted to relate to Isaac at this juncture. “Please just support me on this.”

It broke Carlos’s heart that Cecil felt he needed to ask. Maybe he had been a little too insistent, acting like he was really so knowledgeable in a field that was _literally_ way beyond him. “Of course. Yes, yes, of course. I’m sorry. I was trying – “ He cut himself off from saying ‘Protect you.’ That was not what Cecil needed right now. “It doesn’t matter what I was trying to do. I just don’t want to see you get hurt – anymore.”

Cecil managed a wan smile. “This was all meant to happen, Carlos. Even that part.”

Carlos wished he could be so sure.

            ****************************************

Whatever Cecil said to his brother, it was sufficient to chastise the worst parts of Isaac, because when he showed up at Carlos’s lab the next day he was far more somber about the whole mission. Carlos avoided mentioning the book by name, certainly, though he always tried to do that. The three of them met to strategize over a lunch meeting. Cecil didn’t want to wait; he was having trouble keeping the station operating. Last night’s broadcast came in, but only as if it was stuck between channels on the radio. Exactly what he had to do to make it work, he wouldn’t discuss. During his show he mentioned several power outages, which Carlos would have regarded as the normal budget-trimming of the City Council or mysterious corporate sabotage, but this time it was more ominous. The feeling on the roads was more anxious, more unhinged. Car accidents were increasing drastically. Something was wrong in Night Vale, and t wasn’t going to be get better on its own, nor did the Sheriff’s Secret Police seem inclined to do anything about it.

Carlos was prepared for a reconnaissance mission – after all, he’d tried to do one himself half a dozen times – but he couldn’t get a read on how Cecil would handle it. Cecil was not eager to speak about anything in the letters – understandably so, but in a way that made Carlos a little crazy. Beneath that air of calm there must have been terrible emotions. Or maybe he was just so far removed from his own memories that he didn’t experience them as he would things he actually remembered, and couldn’t process the information in the same emotional way? It would be a small miracle if that was true.

Most importantly, they established, they had to determine what was in the altar. Serious magic had been poured into those sets of bloodstones. Elder gods had been called upon, dark forces summoned, and other things unmentionable. Isaac postulated that it might not be a single being but a mingling of all that had passed through it.

“That means some of Dean is in there,” Cecil said, his voice very quiet but not weak.

“It means that some of _you_ is in there, if the working thesis is correct,” Isaac said. He was obviously fascinated but he didn’t talk about it with the same glee as he did things that did not directly involve his brother. “You’ll probably be able to tell.”

Cecil flinched, the most emotion he’d shown in almost a day. “Last time I was there, I called on Dad, and I became a monster.”

“You have to stop looking at _Dad_ as if he’s good or evil.” It seemed even Isaac had a little trouble with the oddly casual way Cecil referred to his parentage. “He is beyond that. He is order and entropy. We perceive the energy as destruction and chaos because we’re limited in our perception _and_ bound to the earth.”

“But we’re not going to become boundless anytime soon,” Carlos said. “Or at least I won’t.”

Cecil chuckled and ran his fingers through Carlos’s hair. “You did get to go outside the universe for a little bit.”

“I’m not drawing any scientific conclusions about what happened there,” Carlos answered indignantly.

“What I’m trying to say is,” Isaac continued with some irritation, “if you view him as evil and the power you have access to as evil, then it will be. But it doesn’t have to be, and your pre-judgment is unfair. It’s just going to make you end up hating yourself.”

Carlos found he could not bring himself to contradict that statement.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Will no one help the widow’s son?” is actually a Masonic call of distress, not a Boy Scout thing. As far as I know.


	11. From the Aeons

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Before you read, go to my tumblr and [ check this out](http://djclawson.tumblr.com/post/66007879698/hey-look-its-cecils-parents-from-my-fanfic#notes). I don't know where it came from but it was circling around my feed, and it is DEAD ON how I pictured Cecil's parents, or Cecil's parents if his father attempted to stuff part of himself into a human suit for a picture.
> 
> Today's chapter is a reference to "Out of the Aeons" which is not part of the traditional Lovecraft canon but is a sequel to "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" and was written by Lovecraft and Hazel Heald.

Chapter 11

The recon mission began as an abject failure before they had a foot in the door, which was the problem. At first eager to do it, Isaac was reduced to bickering viciously with Carlos about who was alternately man enough, crazy enough, or confident enough to open the door. Neither of them were despite their claims to the contrary. After ten minutes Cecil rolled his eyes, pushed past them, and opened the door as if it was the easiest thing in the world.

What came next was not abject terror but the vicious gusts of moldy, musty wind. The first floor was exactly as Carlos remembered it, with all of the furniture covered by sheets and a thick layer of dust. There were no sounds – not even sounds that should have been there, like the house settling or old stairs creaking or the wind rattling against the windows. When they shut the door behind them, there was no sound at all, even from the street, just their own breathing, which sounded heavy in the absence of anything else to distract them.

“Up here it’s all just stuff.” Carlos swung his flashlight around and tried not to blind Cecil as he searched his face for signs of panic or recognition, but Cecil was bound up in himself and projected nothing but a forced courage. “The police went through it when the house reconstructed itself the first few times but they couldn’t see the basement.”

“There’s no basement,” Cecil corrected. “It’s a blind spot for the police. And for me.” He tapped on his temple to indicate his third eye. “It’s like it’s not there.”

The actual basement was very easy to find, as Carlos had never put the bookshelf back in its position against the door leading to the cellar. Or even shut the door properly. Even though it was early afternoon outside, there was not a single light illuminating the space down there, and their collective flashlights didn’t do much to pierce the inky darkness. It wasn’t until they were in the cellar and the smell hit them that Carlos realized the darkness was itself unnatural, leaving a haunting blackness in the space between them as if the room itself wanted to stay out of the light. He thought he would be ready for the smell but he wasn’t, and was reduced to dry heaves by the stairs with Cecil patting him on the back. His light swung down and he realized he was very nearly vomiting into a skeleton, or part of one. Just the legs.

“He didn’t even get a proper burial,” Cecil said, his voice distorted by both something in the air and his own emotions, which he must have been working hard to keep from overtaking him.

Cecil was talking about Dean. The body – or the remains of it – had to be Dean Curwen’s. The other bones were animal.

Carlos refused to let anything stop them for too long. “Come on.” He strode forward with more courage than he thought he had and his beam of light finally found the altar. It was all there – the Elder sign, the two sets of stones, the humming sound, the book on the floor, the sense of a _presence_ – and suddenly Carlos couldn’t get any closer. He could still put one foot in front of the other, but the distance between him and that table didn’t change.

Though he had never let go of Cecil’s hand, they were further apart them ever, and Cecil’s hand was cold, like it was half-frozen. Carlos didn’t even know where Isaac was. They were all losing each other in this darkness. Protect Cecil, he reminded himself, and turned to find Cecil, looking more white than ever. He was practically transparent. “Cecil?”

“Don’t touch it,” Cecil whispered, though it sounded like it was because he couldn’t raise his voice further than that. “I’ll hurt you.”

“I wasn’t planning – “

“ _Don’t_.” Cecil dug his fingers into Carlos’s wrist and they were sharper than they should have been.

“Cecil,” Isaac reminded him, appearing at his side. “We have to destroy the altar. Things are only going to get worse if we don’t.”

Carlos wanted to say that this was just a recon mission, but Isaac moved too quickly. He reached for one of the bloodstones and there were two screams, one from him and one from Cecil, who fell over into a pile of broken chains and bones.

“Abort! Abort!” Carlos grabbed Cecil with as much force as he could muster, sparing only a hand for one of Isaac’s tentacles and dragged it with him as he sprinted up the stairs. He did not mean to drop Cecil on the lawn, but the breath he’d been holding was expelled with the rest of his energy and Carlos was fairly on his feet himself. Cecil fell to his kneels and sat there on the grass while Isaac released a stream of English and Inuit curses. His hand was bloody and torn as if something he had bitten him.

“Police!” Carlos called out. He remembered that the police were actually not listening in on them all the time anymore. “Uh – something! _Something!_ ”

It took almost a minute for someone to show up. They called it in and tended to Isaac’s wounds first because they were bloody, and only then did Carlos have time to notice Cecil hadn’t gotten up. He was kneeling and his head was practically on the ground in front of him. His breathing was quick and a serious of pained, almost squeaky gasps.

“Cecil?” Carlos reached for his back, but something emerged from Cecil’s neck to stop him. A little tentacle flailed out and slapped him, not particularly hard but enough to make him pause as others emerged. Cecil’s clothing began to stretch as translucent appendages grew out of his skin and tried to free themselves. “Cecil, you – “

The officer was there faster, and fired a blowdart into Cecil’s neck faster than Cecil could swat it away. Whatever it was it was very fast acting, because the appendages stopped flailing and Cecil collapsed on his side. “Cecil,” the officer said calmly through his balaclava, “I’m going to count, and I need you to take deep breaths. Just follow the count, okay?” It was hard to see if Cecil was trying for the first few breaths but it was soon clear that he was, and his extra appendages went limb and started to retract. “Good. Just keep breathing. Focus on counting to five.” The officer stood up and looked at a dumbfounded Carlos. “Citizens who transform, grow, or manifest into something when they panic have to be treated immediately, for their safety and others.”

“What did you give him?”

“A mild sedative for panic attacks.” The officer looked to the road and watched the ambulance pull up. “He should be fine, but you may want to get him checked out anyway. We were told we weren’t allowed to listen or respond until – “

“I know. Thank you, officer.” He never thought he would be so happy to have the assistance of the police, who clearly cared a lot about Cecil’s welfare. Isaac had a more serious injury, but Cecil was still in a state of near-panic. Carlos sat down next to him. Most of the limbs had retracted without fully forming, but his shirt was torn and his sweater stretched out and he was shivering despite the heat of the sun because he was soaked from his sloppy defensive tentacles. Carlos brushed a hand against his cheek and was not rebuffed again. “You’re going to be okay. When I first came out of the house, I wasn’t any better.”

They rode with Isaac to the hospital, where his hand was sewn up and cautionary antibiotics were administered. Cecil did not talk as they checked him over before declaring him well and said he needed to rest and report back if he had another panic attack. No one told them where they had been or what had happened to them.

“I have to do the show,” was the first thing Cecil said after a very long afternoon. “Will you take care of Isaac?” His brother was grumpy despite all the painkillers.

Carlos didn’t bother asking if Cecil was good to work. He wasn’t but he would go. “Of course.”

Cecil wanted to be driven to the station. He wouldn’t even stop for a change of clothes, insisting he had a spare shirt at work. He left Carlos and Isaac alone in the car for the drive back to Isaac’s place.

“So are you going to collect actual data, or – “

“He’ll tell me,” Carlos said, not knowing if it was true. “What did you feel when you touched that bloodstone?”

“Not Cecil. Not directly. I didn’t have enough time to - ,” Isaac shook his head. “There’s something in there. They conjured something, probably without knowing they did it. Or they created something unintentionally. It has to be banished.”

“Cecil is connected to it.” Which was obvious.

“He’s probably the one who has to do it,” Isaac said, scratching at the edges of his bandages. “He has to find a way to end the connection. The altar is awake now, and it might be feeding on him. It’s clearly feeding on the town. If he doesn’t act, things are only going to get worse.”

Carlos listened to the show as usual, but most of it in his car at the parking lot to the station. Cecil’s voice was its usual sonorous, confident self, propped up by whatever power and comfort the microphone gave him, but it was a ragged version of the real show. There was a suspicious amount of pre-recorded segments and Cecil was otherwise scatterbrained, losing his place and correcting himself twice and using a stock sign-off with very little personality. He was slow to emerge from the station.

“How’s Isaac?” was the only thing he had to say when he climbed into the car.

“He’s okay. I took him back to his place and we ordered dinner. Your portion is in the backseat if you want it now.” Carlos held his tongue for the whole ride, which he thought was impressive, as Cecil quietly munched on a cold sandwich and chips. In the apartment he abandoned his torn clothing and went straight to pajamas, and probably would have gone to bed had Carlos not stopped him. “I need to know what happened.”

Cecil sighed. “I can’t describe it.”

“Try. Please.”

His boyfriend absent-mindedly ran his fingers over the edge of the couch like he was tracing a pattern. “It was, um – hmm. At first it was like being pulled. Like you had grabbed my arm and pulled very hard, but it wasn’t my arm. It was inside me.” It did not sound very pleasant. Carlos sat down next to him but Cecil just continued to fidget and flee his touch. “It was like all these years since I left that house I’ve been wearing this human suit that’s not real, and it was going to be torn off.”

“Cecil, you know that’s not true.”

“It _felt_ true. If you told me then I wouldn’t have believed you. I wasn’t capable of believing you.” He shook his head. “I wasn’t myself anymore. I was part of something bigger and ... worse.” He was dry for the first time in hours but he was still shivering. “I started to think that I’d never really left. That this has all been a dream.”

Carlos was familiar with Cecil’s perchance for existential crisises, but this couldn’t have been a worse time. “It did happen. This is all real.” He forced his hand over Cecil’s. “ _I’m_ real.”

Cecil was holding back. Cecil wanted to say “I don’t know that” but he didn’t want to offend.

“Cecil, don’t run from me,” Carlos insisted. “I know this day was hard on you. I know I can’t begin to imagine what it felt like. What this whole thing has felt like. But you’re still here and you’re my boyfriend and I won’t let you go.”

Cecil finally smiled.

Even though this was much deeper and shocking than Cecil’s average moment of existential angst that could shut him down for days, they applied the same treatment. They curled up in bed, Carlos around Cecil, and he put Cecil’s hand on his heart and made him feel the vibrations. He traced all of Cecil’s scars, explained and unexplained, and he took Cecil’s fingers and dragged them across his, to remind him that Carlos was both real and human and he was even imperfect. There was the scar along his hairline, from a fall in the playground. His knees both had small spots where he’d once knelt in shards of glass while looking for something.

Cecil traced the scars on Carlos’s wrists and Carlos did not need to repeat that story, but he would have if it needed to be said. The story came early in their relationship because Carlos saw Cecil was curious but not going to say anything on his own. It was from the worst year in Carlos’s life He was in high school and he couldn’t focus. He was doing badly in every class but biology. There were problems with immigration and he almost had to go to court with his aunt. All of this added to the moment when he realized that these new feelings about boys weren’t going to change, which happened during a particularly fiery rant by a youth pastor in the church’s after-hours program that kept kids busy while their parents were at work, and Carlos realized he was only killing time until he went to hill.

But all of that passed, Carlos told Cecil that first night. Because his aunt found him and she was more accepting than he ever thought she would be. She pulled him out of the program. They stopped going to church altogether except to hear Mass and pray for her husband’s soul. She cornered enough school counselors as to why her brilliant nephew was doing so poorly, which had to be their fault, and he eventually found his way to a psychiatrist’s office, where he was diagnosed with ADD and medicated and while it wasn’t exactly a real boost to his self-esteem, he felt like himself again. His cousin was a lawyer and sorted out his paperwork. Life went on because people cared about him and they didn’t abandon him when they could have, and he was not going to abandon Cecil, even if Cecil didn’t thin he existed.

This unspoken reminder – with the last part actually spoken at one point – and a lot of being held and listening to the night screams and the early morning chants meant Cecil drifted back to him. He still didn’t have a lot to say, but he admitted it was because he didn’t know _how_ to say what he was feeling, something that embarrassed the normally effusive man who was paid to talk for a living and that in of itself was scary to him.

“I have an idea for tomorrow,” Cecil said at the very end of the night, which was technically the day. “For the broadcast. But it’s just a temporary solution, and I don’t know if I can do it.”

Carlos nodded. He was actually too tired for an explanation.

Cecil was gone when he woke. Even though it was late for Carlos, it was early for Cecil, who left a note saying he was spending the day at the station, and yes he packed a lunch. Carlos knew it might be Cecil’s way of saying he needed a little space, which was understandable considering the events of the past few days. Carlos was distracted anyway by another mandatory drive out to see the mayor. To his surprise, the drive took him _beyond_ Night Vale to one of the diners he saw when he came out to mail a letter or make a phone call. He even ate there once when he was fed up with not having toast in the morning.

Interim-Mayor Winchell was waiting for him at the booth. The diner was almost empty, the other diners being on the other side of the long room. Pamela was smoking nervously, something Carlos had never see her do. Her hair was grayer than he remembered, but she had her own troubles, so he decided not to ask.

Coffee – ordinary coffee – was served and she explained that she ordered it for him, because there was no weird faceless ghost to do that here.

“How is your research going?”

Carlos still looked around even though the very location of their meeting meant no one was watching them. “There’s an altar we have to destroy.”

"The police have been all over the house.”

“It’s in the basement. They can’t see it. Cecil says it’s a blind spot, even for him. You have to be standing there to notice it. And then, not even.” He put milk in his coffee without making an offering to the bee god who made milk in Night Vale. “Isaac thinks Cecil has to be the one to destroy it, but it’s just a theory.”

“How is he?” She did not mean Isaac.

“He’s ... dealing.” He didn’t want to go into specifics. “Algonquin definitely had reasons for holding back that information.”

“Do you know what happened to Dean Curwen? Is he really dead?”

“Yes. I’ve seen his skeleton.”

She looked relieved. “Do you have a plan?”

He shook his head.

“Whatever’s in that house – the altar – it’s tearing up Night Vale. It’s messing with the electricity grid, with our wireless, with the City Council – they won’t talk about it but they also won’t meet, and they always meet. They Sheriff wants to dynamite the place again. I think it might just make it worse.”

“It would make things more complicated.”

“I want you to tell Cecil that if he needs _anything_ , he can have it,” the mayor reiterated. “He’ll probably say no. There’s things at the station we can’t understand, so it’s hard to help. But he should know that we made the offer.

You _made the offer_ , Carlos corrected in his head. “I’ll let him know.”

            ****************************************

Carlos did not get a chance to talk to Cecil before the broadcast. There were no interns answering the phones and Cecil’s phone no longer had reception inside the building.]

The broadcast started out as it had been for the last few nights – barely audible and full of static. Even the pre-recorded stuff was clearly being played as loud as possible with diminished results. After the initial news and ads, there was a long pause, followed by studio sounds, and then nothing again for thirty seconds. Carlos clocked it.

“I apologize, listeners,” Cecil said. “We’re having some difficulties with the station, but we here at Night Vale Community Radio are dedicated to bringing you the latest news and entertainment no matter what the cost.” He said it in his booming voice and it sounded so clear and so loud Carlos jumped a little in his seat and looked around his lab to see if Cecil was in the room with him. It was ... not radio. There was no distance between them, even though Cecil was somewhere else.

Carlos looked out his window, and he could see the people eating in Big Rico’s had stopped mid-chew and were staring at their radios with the same dumbstruck expressions. What they were hearing was not familiar to them even though it was Cecil’s voice.

“We’re going to get a bit ... unorthodox tonight,” Cecil said. No, Cecil _broadcasted_. “No, listeners, this does not mean I will be going on about my wonderful Carlos. You may all be very eager for that news, and let me assure you that he is wonderful as always, but tonight I thought I might ... remind you of Night Vale. Perhaps from a perspective you haven’t seen. How often do we _really_ look at our surroundings?”

He then went on to fill the rest of the show with his own haunting descriptions of the various locations in town, discussing their history and occasionally letting his mind wander into fond recollections from his childhood of stores that were there or used to be there, and Carlos could piece together one important thing that Cecil was not explicitly stating –

Cecil was describing things from above.

Carlos listened to the end of the show in his car, racing to the station. No one was there to greet him or to stop him, but there was a big “do not disturb” sign written in finger paint in the hallway leading to Cecil’s booth. Management was unusually quiet and Carlos passed them unharmed. He found Cecil in his booth – or, more accurately, he found Cecil’s body in his booth, slumped over the desk with his head pressed into the wood, both arms limp at his sides.

The microphone was gone. It was the second thing Carlos noticed. He had only seen it a few times, as interns usually stopped him at this point, but he knew that no one was allowed to touch or move the microphone except Cecil. It was made of something special and had never been replaced despite all the technological advances in the past ninety years.

He could see the door was locked and barred, and he had no intention of disturbing whatever ritual was going on despite his keen interest in figuring out of Cecil was technically alive. He waited an anxious ten minutes after the broadcast ended before he saw a stirring from Cecil, who picked his head off the desk with what resembled Herculean efforts, and mouthed Carlos’s name.

Carlos pointed to the locks. It took Cecil more time to get up and open them. He was carrying the microphone, which he set back on the desk as he let Carlos in. He was too tired to stop Carlos from checking all the vital signs and taking his pulse, though he sat there and watched with a bemused glance. His eyes were crossed and unfocused.

“How did it go?”

“You sounded amazing,” Carlos stuttered. “Not that you should do that again. It didn’t sound easy.”

“It wasn’t,” Cecil said, and didn’t elaborate. Though he hadn’t asked Carlos to come, he would fall asleep in his chair if Carlos didn’t pick him up and practically carry him home. “Technically I wasn’t broadcasting outside the station. I needed it to power the microphone.”

“But you were outside your body.”

Cecil’s smile was so adorably bemused. “Yes and no. Mostly yes. I – I had to look at the house.”

“You said it was a blind spot.”

“To other people,” Cecil clarified. “I’m still down there. I don’t mean in the metaphorical sense. Some of me is still down there, in that bloodstone circle. So is Dean’s spirit. 

“What does the house look like?” 

“It looks like it’s on fire.”


	12. Fatherhood

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Special thanks to all who left comments. I don't have a major story planned at the moment that follows this one because I just don't feel like I could top it, but I still have some creative energy for these characters, so leave comments if there's something you'd like to see.
> 
> Even though I wrote all of this in October, it's more than 50,0000 words so it's serving as my NaNoWriMo entry for 2013. 
> 
> Other than that, Enjoy!

Chapter 12

“We should do it on Saturday.”

This level of planning came as a surprise to Carlos, who was still catching up on bloodstones and wondering what his scientific knowledge of the house (which was little) could possibly contribute, but Cecil was stern. He didn’t have to work on the weekends, so he could rest up Friday night and Saturday, and if he still existed, recover on Sunday.

“And what are we going to do, exactly?” Carlos still hadn’t asked any scholars to take the Necronomicon, or even openly discussed it with Isaac.

“The spirit in the altar has be destroyed,” Cecil explained, drawing on pools of knowledge he sometimes forgot he had from growing up in Night Vale. “Banishing would be easier, but it’s probably too tied to me. And sometimes ... well, I can be pretty good at destroying things.” He offered an uncomfortable smile. “I just don’t want to take Night Vale with me.”

“I suppose Isaac has some theories on that?”

“He is a little more – knowledgeable than me.” Cecil looked embarrassed. “He says he can keep you safe.”

Carlos didn’t say anything, but his face must have given away what he thought of that.

“I don’t know whether he really knows, either,” he continued. “I like to think I would never hurt you, but – I don’t know, okay? But I do know that if I ask you to stay away, or even leave Night Vale while we’re in there –

“ – I’ll refuse.”

His boyfriend brightened a little. “Yes. I said you would.” His smile was quickly gone. “There’s a second option. The spirit is tied to the bloodstones, and the bloodstones are tied to me, so...”

“And Dean?”

“Dean is dead. There’s some of him alive in there, but it’s just phantom. A part of him that hasn’t been released. The only thing holding it together is the fact that I’m still alive.”

“Cecil – “

“So, how good are you at resuscitation?”

“Cecil, _no_.” Carlos stood up and cupped his hands around Cecil’s chin. “It’s not going to come to that. That house isn’t worth dying for.” He wanted to say, _Night Vale isn’t worth dying for_ but he knew Cecil would always say otherwise.

“Relax,” Cecil said. “I’m going to be the Voice of Night Vale for a while yet. Though it might be as a ghost. So maybe don’t relax.”

“Cecil ... do you know who the next Voice of Night Vale is?”

Cecil regarded him as if he was an idiot. “Of course.”

“Can you tell me who it is?”

“No.”

“Not even – “

“We’re not continuing this line of questioning.” Cecil’s voice had a firmness he usually didn’t use with Carlos. Or ever. “Everything happens in line even if I see things out of order. That was why Al never told me anything. Just please – forget about it.”

Carlos bit his lip but didn’t continue asking. “Just tell me what I can do.”

“Stay alive,” Cecil said. “And maybe find a portable defibrillator?”

            ****************************************

While Cecil was at work, Carlos decided to stop by Isaac’s place. He’d done little to decorate further on his own, but it was filled with books, most still stuffed in shipping boxes. Some of the titles looked quite harmless but none of them looked municipally-approved. Isaac had his permission slip framed on the wall. He said he got it through contacts at work.

“I want to talk about the book in the Curwen house.”

“You can say the name,” Isaac said with glee as he set the pot on the stove. “ _Necronomicon_. The book of the names of the dead.”

“I know what it’s called.”

“But have you read it?”

“Just one page.” Carlos shivered.

“For Cecil, I assume?”

“Of course.”

“But did you show it to him? Did you make a copy or write it down on another page?”

“No.”

“Well then.” Isaac shuffled around his kitchen. “I suppose you know what’s best for Cecil. You have some psychic awareness that comes with fucking him?”

“Don’t – that’s not what this is about. And you don’t have to be so crude.”

But Isaac wouldn’t be dissuaded. “I’m willing to bet anything Cecil knows more about the content of that book that either of us ever will, whether he says he understood it or not. It did fall into _his_ hands.”

“It doesn’t belong to him.”

“So who does it belong to, then? People – scholars, professors, wannabe sorcerers – have used that book, which is a record of where we come from, to hunt us down and kill us. You were told what that kid used the book to do to Cecil. You don’t want it to happen again? Don’t give it to another set of curious humans. Especially not self-righteous ones,” Isaac spat. “I’m an eldritch _and_ Inuit. I’ve had people telling me what to think and do with both sides of my heritage all my life, and I’m sick of it.”

Carlos swallowed. Isaac ... had a point. “What do you recommend?”

“It was Cecil’s find first, so let him choose. It belongs to him more than either of us. And don’t guilt him one way or another. Don’t hang trauma you can’t begin to imagine over his head.” In the background, the teapot was squealing. “If he wants to give it to me, he’ll give it to me. If he wants to give it to you so you can ship it to some high security vault, he’ll do that. He can make his own decisions.” Isaac returned to the table with tea. “What Cecil’s going to do – what Cecil suspects he has to do – he’s going to need our help. But we can only help him so far. The rest, we just have to be there for him. Everything else, we can figure out later.”

Carlos nodded.

“If there is a later,” Isaac said, and sipped his tea.

            ****************************************

Carlos held Cecil extra close that night, if it was possible. “I spoke to your brother about you.”

“All good things, I hope?”

He rested his chin on the back of Cecil’s neck. “I think he’s worried about you.”

“Are you?”

Carlos nodded.

“I’m glad you agree on _something_ ,” Cecil said with an exasperated sigh. “I know Isaac is hard to like sometimes. Even people who like him in town have trouble with him.”

“I do like him. He’s your brother.”

“I just ... I want you to like him just because. Because the past is the past. Isaac is in Night Vale now. He’s fitting in. He’s happy. I just want him to be happy.” Cecil couldn’t ask Carlos to do what he was asking, really. There was something innate about disliking Isaac’s presence, something even Night Vale couldn’t totally smother. And it was a part of Cecil too, Carlos thought.

That was what Cecil was saying. He wanted his brother’s eldritch side to be accepted because he wanted his own paternal side accepted.

“Cecil, I love every part of you,” Carlos said. He barely had to whisper. The bedroom was so quiet and still before between the evening chants and the morning screams. “Every single thing. Even the parts _you_ don’t like. It means I love your mother and I love your ... father, because they brought you into this world. And everything connected to you.” He kissed his shoulder. “Nothing can change that. Nothing in the world. Or outside the world. In the dark between the stars.”

“The void?”

“You know what I mean.”

They were so close he could feel Cecil’s smile. “What happens happens.”

“Right. And I love you for it.”

Cecil’s body eased further into Carlos’s arms, releasing tension that maybe Cecil didn’t know he was holding in. That Carlos had prodded out of him. It was the best Carlos could do, and for that moment it was enough.

            ****************************************

Cecil spent Saturday morning sleeping in and most of the early afternoon wandering the house, looking for more sacrifices his bloodstone circle would possibly accept. In went a coffee cup (chipped), the rest of their garlic powder, and a month’s worth of bulk mail and coupons. Carlos did not ask if he felt he was ready. He supposed it didn’t matter either way, but the question might make Cecil nervous.

Isaac came over at three, bringing with him an assortment of knives, a can of gasoline, and two flame throwers. “We’re burning this to the ground, right?”

“As soon as we can.” Carlos wanted the book to go up in smoke, but he knew it wouldn’t burn.

“After the altar is broken and the stones are removed,” Cecil clarified. “And we should take some piece of Dean with us. To be buried with his stones. Like a skull, if we can find it.”

As to what they would actually be facing down there, they only had suspicions.

“Whatever happens down there, I love you, but if it goes badly, you should run,” Cecil told Carlos. “Don’t try to save me.”

“Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do,” Carlos replied, but with a sad smile.

They arrived at the Desert Cliffs housing complex to find it emptied out. The Sheriff’s Secret Police established a parameter, which was made more difficult because electronic devices were now dropping out and frying anywhere near the house. The Sheriff was nowhere in sight, which was not unexpected, as he did actually keep his identity secret. Cecil said he had never met him.

They were all wearing riot gear, except for Cecil, who was only wearing a vest. They had practiced as many different chants as they could, though Isaac and Cecil would be the ones more responsible for that, if it came to it.

“Iodine pills,” he reminded the radioactivity-prone brothers and handed them out. They went over the plans again with no idea if they would work.

Without thinking, Carlos crossed himself before entering the building.

As the sun set over white sheets and hidden furniture, the air in the room was different. It was moving, like there was a current, even if there was no source of it and the air was not fresh. There was a faint vibration in the floor. The house itself was rejecting them. Carlos got a little shock, but Cecil just smiled supportively as they made their way to the basement.

The door to the long-hidden basement was blown off, shattered into hundreds of pieces.

There flashlights worked on the stairs, then flickered out entirely as if the batteries had suddenly burst. They were prepared for this. Isaac was carrying old candle lanterns, and it was more assuring to hold one when they intended to burn down the building anyway.

They could find the altar easily enough. Past the bones and chains and bloodstains the whole thing was glowing with a pulsing red light like a beating heart, and the stones with twinkling. Everything about it said ‘DO NOT TOUCH.’

Cecil stepped forward fearlessly and made signs in the air – protective sigils for them and symbols for the spirit. He started and they chanted in unison from ancient texts. Cecil was an expert, Isaac had the knowledge but not the vocal proficiency, and Carlos was a professor from Miskatonic and did his best to keep up.

The Elder sign on the altar began to glow too, and the altar appeared to be growing. Some black mass was emerging behind it. It was coming closer and closer, gaining awareness of its surroundings – and then without a word, it grabbed Cecil by its endless tendrils and pulled him into the altar.

            ****************************************

“Some of you is in there,” Isaac had hypothesized. “So you may be looking at part of yourself. Whatever you were forced to give up. So it will be like – “

“ – looking in a mirror,” Cecil said, and understood.

He did not like to look into mirrors. They never told him anything good.

Cecil got up. His emergency bag was missing, as were Carlos and Isaac. The altar was just a piece of hewn stone with the Yellow Sign carved into it. And beyond that, well ...

He tried not to look, but he _felt_. He felt every moment that he half-remembered or had entirely forgotten. He could hear his chants with Dean, when they read the Necronomicon aloud in Dean’s kitchen before moving to the basement. He remembered his first dream beyond the stars, where they rode the White Ship and he saw the First Gate but could not pass through it. He remembered killing that man from Desert Bluffs and stripping off the flesh with his fangs. All of the terrible things he had done, only partially of his own volition, but still of something that came from him and made it possible, because Marie Baldwin was not his only parent.

And Dean ... Dean was here, next to him. Cecil peaked out from behind his hands that were covering his eyes and saw Dean deformed not by heritage or magic but by madness, muttering to himself in a language he could not understand beyond a primal, untapped level. This little spirit of Dean was trapped, and he mind had snapped. Cecil wondered how long the process took.

A wild whip of a black appendage flew at him and knocked his hands away, and he tumbled to the floor.

“LOOK AT ME,” it said. Or he said. It was not a he but there were two  men in it, him and Dean. “LOOK AT YOUR CREATION.”

He rolled over so he could not look and covered his head with both hands. One long tentacle grabbed him by the ankle and lifted him into the air, shaking him. “YOU SUMMONED ME WITH BLOOD AND BILE. YOU MADE ME AND I GAVE YOU POWER. AND NOW YOU HAVE ABANDONED ME.”

Cecil kept his eyes shut, protecting his face with his arms. He could not look into a mirror of himself. He knew what would happen then.

“FATHER,” it cried out, and Cecil felt his heart ache, but only for a moment before it trust a tentacle into his chest. It broke through flesh and bone as a single, pointed thing but Cecil could feel it expanding inwards and outward inside him, with endings forever multiplying. It did not hurt but it did not feel good.

He was a father. A terrible father. Like his own, but he was not the beginning and the end, the space between the stars while also being the stars. He had just been a stupid kid, reading a book he wasn’t supposed to read, not having the courage to notice the signs that things were going wrong. He would have loved to blame it on Dean, the architect of it all, but the tension growing inside him told him he could not. He was connecting to this thing. It was his child, his and Dean’s, that they birthed together with too much of their own life force.

He was not uncaring, but he wanted to survive.

“FATHER!” It wanted some acknowledgement as he threw him around, which it could easily do without losing hold of him because it felt like half of his insides were now connected and he felt the words before they were spoken. “HELP ME FATHER!”

He reached blindly for something, anything. He arm caught the stone altar, which hummed and sparked with electricity. He felt it reaching into him too, filling him with power. He could not kill this strange creation without looking at it. He could not dismiss it and break it apart without the proper concentration. But if he _looked_ –

Cecil held his breath and took a strong grip on the stone, calling all of its energy to it. All energy originated from beyond the Ultimate Gate, where the illusions were cut away and one understood. _Father, help me!_ And as another tentacle reached out to tear his arm away, Cecil brought both hands to his eyes.

The result was a great shock. Electricity coursed through him and then the spirit. They both felt it. They both screamed. His was more human, but barely so. The tendrils in him shrunk and retreated and he fell to the ground, untethered. His chest was still open and now bleeding, and his head hurt. He could smell the burning even though it had only lasted a second, until the electricity left him.

The cries of the spirit were unbearable. They were not in angry language at all, though he caught bits of words here and there. It was hurt. It had not expected to be hurt, and deep down, Cecil did not want it to hurt any longer.

He reached for the stone altar, but could not find it. Finally he opened his only remaining eye – the third one – and saw it, though not in the way it would have been represented to anyone else. He saw it as defined by the connection of all things, places, and people, and how it was connected to him and how it was connected to the spirit, and he rested his hands on it to hold himself up as he looked up at his creation.

It was not a person, certainly. The aspects of Dean and Cecil in it were emotional and spiritual, not physical. It changed shape constantly, all flailing limps and eyes one minute and then attempting to summon a human form the next but never quite coming close. The intensity would have killed his two working eyes and snapped his mind as it had Dean’s, but he wasn’t using either of those.

The spirit looked stunned, if it could manage to look that way. Cecil felt what he was seeing rather than _saw_ what he was seeing. “I’m sorry,” Cecil managed to say, his own weakness catching up with him. He could not maintain his own form and keep his awareness of what was around him much longer. “I wish it could be another way.” _But you must go between the stars now_. He reached into his gaping wound, where he found easy blood for the altar as he drew the letters and signs to cast out and destroy.

“NO. I NEED YOU. I NEED ALL OF YOU.”

Cecil wanted to explain that there was no true distinction between them. Every living thing was connected. They were all parts of each other and ultimately all parts of Yog-Sothoth. He couldn’t say it, but his expression could, and the intense link between them could tell the spirit more than he could ever hope to understand. “I will see you again soon.” In the span of millennia, what were a few decades? And then he chanted to the cries of his creature, his son, tearing away the parts that belong to him and returning them to his own body, and releasing the parts that belonged to Dean, and then draining the altar. He called it into himself and then cast it away, offering the power itself up as a sacrifice to the Guardians of the Gates. With nothing holding the spirit there, it no longer fit where it was, and it did not dissipate but moved every atom not in a single direction but many toward the sky.

“Someday,” Cecil said. “I promise.”

What little light he saw dimmed, and he curled up in that black space and his life went dark.

            ****************************************

“Cecil!” Carlos rushed to his boyfriend’s side as he was tossed out of the altar with the same weird momentum that had drawn him into it just a few moments before. “Jesus Christ, Cecil!” The light of the altar was fading and it was getting harder to see, but there was a gaping wound in Cecil’s chest that went right through the body armor and blood all over his face. He reach for a pulse, wishing the seconds to go by faster until he found one, slow but steady. “He’s alive, but he needs help.” The vest was probably the only thing holding Cecil together.

Still fearing the Altar, Isaac used his tentacles to pluck the silent bloodstones out of it and put them in a bag with what they hoped was Dean’s skull, which was missing the jaw. He whipped his tail around so it struck the altar, knocking it over and sending the various ritual implements flying. He paused only to grab the Necronomicon, now revealed by the disturbed sheet. “Let’s burn this motherfucker.”

“Shouldn’t we – “

“We should not wait,” Isaac said. “We should not wait another G-ddamn second.” He pushed over the altar stone that had held up the platform and it smashed in two when it hit the floor. “You carry Cecil. I’ll get this.”

Carlos wasn’t sure about that arrangement, but he didn’t have time to question Isaac’s arson-related instincts. Cecil was lighter than him, but still not very easy to carry. By the time he the stairs he could smell the burning flame being lit. Which would have been fine, if the stairs hadn’t collapsed out from under him, worn down by years of decay and the weight of two bodies at once. He would have fallen but he was caught by one very slim arm with unusual strength behind it.

At the first floor landing was Pamela Winchell, still in a suit but lacking the jacket and wearing a protective vest instead. A cord was wound around her waist. “Give me Cecil!”

Carlos fumbled to do so. She couldn’t carry both up at once. Carlos was terrified that Cecil would come apart as he was lifted up, but the mayor removed the cord from her armor and wound it around Cecil. “Pull him out!” she shouted to someone else, then reached back for Carlos. “Give me your hand.”

The flames were spreading quickly now. Carlos hadn’t figured on the stairway collapsing. Neither had Isaac. “I’ve got him,” Isaac shouted from behind the scientist, and reached up to the landing with his tentacles, taking Carlos in his arms as all four of his extra appendages had to work to pull him up. “There’s always a little snag – “ He found the mayor’s hand so she could guide him up and out. He didn’t even allow time for Carlos to find his own footing as they abandoned the house, following the path offered by the cord because there was now total darkness despite all the open windows, with the exception of the flames behind them.

They would have hit the ground but Isaac kept them running, dragging Carlos with him until they were past the lawn and the parameter and behind the police blast shields. “It should go up in – “

Moments, he meant. Or maybe seconds. That’s what it took, before he could finish the phrase, and the house exploded in a bright burst of red and yellows and blues against the night sky. The sound it made was from explosive charges going off, not ordinary fire.

Within a minute, the House That Did Not Exist ... did not exist. What remained was an awesome fireball that leapt into the sky with a fiery eagerness.

Carlos might have appreciated it a little more – or at least felt a sense of resolution – had his attention not turned to Cecil, who was being loaded into an ambulance. “Cecil!” He pressed his way passed the policemen and climbed in with the EMTs. It was only a short ride to the hospital but they were already trying to sew his chest wound shut, or at least control he bleeding. His eyes were covered in a bandage. Carlos grimaced and held Cecil’s hand, the one that wasn’t being jabbed with tubes and needles. “I’m here. Cecil, I’m still with you.”

“ _Father_ ,” Cecil whispered hoarsely. Carlos leaned in and waited for Cecil to finish his thought. “It called me father.”

            ****************************************

Cecil was taken to Night Vale Specific Hospital instead of Night Vale General Hospital. Carlos couldn’t determine the difference except that the staff used the word ‘specific’ a lot, as in “We’re specifically prepping him for surgery now,” or “We’re specifically worried about his eyes.”

Isaac showed up some time later, his face and coat covered in ash and soot. “The house is gone.”

“Good.”

“There’s nothing left but the foundation,” Isaac said as he sat down next to Carlos. “And when the fire is out, they’re going to tear that up and fill in the hole.”

Carlos nodded. His attention was on the wall across from him. His attention was on Cecil.

Isaac opened his backpack and pulled out something wrapped in a blanket and a layer of foil. Carlos didn’t need to be told what it was. “So – do you want to look at it?”

“I would like nothing less.”

“I thought you might say that,” Isaac replied without a hint of his usual smarm and put it back in his bag. “What do they think?”

“They don’t know. There’s a lot of internal damage.”

“We can take a lot of internal damage. Trust me on this one.”

Was Isaac actually trying to comfort him? “They also said his eyes look pretty bad. If he can handle that surgery they’re going to do it right away, so he’ll be in there a very long time.”

“Cecil has a third eye, doesn’t he?”

“It’s not the same.”

They waited the whole night, nodding off for minutes at a time before slumping over and waking up with soar muscles from the needlessly uncomfortable chairs. Around two in the morning Carlos got up to wash himself up in the bathroom, and at some point Isaac did the same, because his face looked cleaner and his beard was wet when Carlos stirred again. Neither of them said very much, and there was no one else to talk to. The entire hospital was not very large and all of the doctors and nurses seemed to have disappeared into the operating room. It was quite possible that Cecil was the only new patient, or the only patient at all.

A doctor greeting them sometime after sunrise, though they could hardly tell from the harsh fluorescents and sterile hospital environment. “Mr. Baldwin just came out of surgery. You can see him but he’s still unconscious.”

“How is he?”

“We were able to repair the damage to his chest, spine, and lungs. As for his eyes, we won’t know until they heal and the bandages come off, but his vision will probably be limited at best. Try not to get his hopes up too much.”

Carlos would have thanked the doctor but he was busy dashing to Cecil’s room in ICU. He caught his breath when he stopped himself from reaching out to Cecil, afraid to wake him with the nurse frowning at him. There was very little of Cecil to see, with the gown and bandages everywhere and the oxygen mask. His hair was very grey. It made him look older than it usually did when it was grey.

Carlos stayed the day, switching off with Isaac as one of them napped in the armchair and the other held Cecil’s hand. The nurses were about to shove him out the door when Cecil stirred, but it was a long time before he said anything. Carlos told him what had happened. Now that the foundation was removed the Curwen house was completely gone and it had not reappeared. He didn’t talk so much about the damage to Cecil’s eyes.

At last, Cecil turned his head in Carlos’s direction and smiled. “ _Carlo_ s.” He reached out but he couldn’t find him, and Carlos had to grab his hand. “Perfect, perfect Carlos.”

“You need a new word, _mí amor_.”

“But it’s so ... _perfect_.” Cecil’s voice was hoarse from a breathing tube but his humor seemed to be back. “You’re so beautiful.”

Carlos thought the phrasing was kind of odd, given the circumstances, but he didn’t question it. “How do you feel?”

“I’ve been better.” And he was given a lot of morphine when he first woke up. “Isaac is – “

“Over there.” Carlos needlessly pointed to the armchair in the far corner.

“I know. I mean, is he okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, he’s fine. We’re both fine.” He kissed Cecil’s hand. “We don’t know what happened to you exactly, but the altar spirit is gone.”

“He’s not destroyed.” Cecil looked a bit uncomfortable. A bit worried? “He was too much his own person. Dean and I put so much in there and we called on so many things, he had some distinction. He wanted to be connected to me.”

“That’s why he stabbed you?”

“I don’t think he meant to hurt me. He ... I made him. _We_ made him together. He’s our child.”

That was a rather disturbing word. “It’s a he?”

“Well, I suppose it’s not really relevant. I sent him to the hoary void in the stars,” Cecil explained. “Dean was there, in the altar. Just a little bit of him. He was insane. Looking at the spirit broke him. I had to look without being broken so ...” He gestured to his face with his other hand.

“You did that to yourself?”

“We have to take responsibility for our actions, even if they were unintentional. Al taught me that.”

“But your vision – “

“Carlos, dear Carlos.” Cecil held Carlos’ hand and squeezed. “But I _can_ see.”

            ****************************************

The damage to Cecil’s body was more extensive than it looked from the outside and it kept him in the hospital for a long time. This didn’t excuse him from work. The interns wheeled in a cart with the microphone and spent an hour going over the necessary announcements for the show. Cecil was still on oxygen and could barely sit up, but his voice gained its usual cadence when the mic was on, with only a couple stops to be corrected about a phrase from the announcements, or when he had to tell the intern to key up the pre-recorded messages or the weather on the keyboard. It was fascinating to watch him briefly come to life without wheezing or coughing and then have it disappear just as fast the moment the show was over.

“In other news, the house in the Desert Cliffs development that did not exist no longer exists. It is literally gone. It will not be discussed again,” he said in his first show.

While he did not mention he was in the hospital, it was a small town and word got around, and people were sending in gift baskets and leaving him voicemail and text messages. “Listeners, while I appreciate the wonderful cookies that have been sent daily, I am on a bit of a liquid diet, so I suppose I should clarify that _Carlos_ is enjoying them. That said, cookies are not exactly a well-rounded diet, so if anyone could possibly donate a salad or a sandwich, our dear Carlos, who refuses to leave my side and relies too much on whatever’s lying around, can receive proper nutrition.”

Cecil was of course exaggerating. Carlos went out for meals and home at night, or to his lab, where the Necronomicon was currently stored until its future ownership could be determined. But he was in the hospital most of his waking hours. He knew how Cecil hated being bored, and not being able to watch television or cat videos on his iphone wasn’t helping the long recover.

Cecil could see, but only with his third eye. It was different than before. He could not describe how he saw people, going on about the interconnected-ness of atoms and how they came to form shimmering lights before giving up. The problem was he could _only_ see people, and only some colorful outline of them, he said. It was as if they were drawn on a blank white canvas to him. Carlos tried to be optimistic; if the results of the surgery weren’t good, he would take him to New York to see some world-class ophthalmologist.

Even though Cecil claimed not to be distressed, he looked rather anxious after a week of enforced hospitalization and a sedentary lifestyle where even going to the bathroom was embarrassingly difficult. The doctor came at last to cut away the bandages, and they all held their breaths as he did.

“It might take some time to focus – don’t try to rush it, Mr. Baldwin,” the doctor said patiently when he saw Cecil blinking his eyes very rapidly.

“I can see – I think I can!” Cecil said with a strange energy. His face was still marred by burns and the colors of both his pupils and irises seemed dimmed, as if there was a milky coat of paint over them, but they did move around and were able to follow the doctor’s pen light. As soon as the doctor was out of the way, Carlos hugged Cecil so hard he have crushed him if Cecil wasn’t stronger. “Can you see me?”

“Carlos,” Cecil said in that way of his. “I can see you better than I ever have before.” He cupped Carlos’s cheek, his pupils not quite meeting Carlos’s despite their faces in close proximity. “You are _so beautiful_.”

Despite the good cheer, Cecil was eventually declared legally blind. He only had some vision with his two regular eyes, and the way he was using them was something extraordinary that would have flustered a non-Night Vale doctor. Cecil could get around, and nominally passed a reading exam but only with the larger letters, but he could see people better than inanimate objects that lacked bright colors and had trouble determining distances and using depth perception. He might get better over time, but they were out of surgeries to perform on him in Night Vale. He would probably need a cane for the rest of his life, at least for unfamiliar spaces.

To Carlos’s shock, Cecil’s driver’s license wasn’t shredded. “Of course the blind can drive,” Cecil said, sounding a little offended. “They just have to be armed when they do it.” This amused Isaac endlessly, though he eventually agreed to conspire with Carlos to keep Cecil off the streets, at least for a while.

            ****************************************

It was a full two weeks before Cecil was discharged from the hospital, and another before he was allowed to go back to work in the station. Until then he was told to work at home and otherwise get plenty of rest. No one attempted to tell the Voice of Night Vale not to do his show. It was so nice to hear Cecil gaining strength day by day instead of losing it, as he had been for so long. He was more at peace with himself than he should have been after all the traumatic experiences of the past month.

“Some of me was trapped down there with Dean and that ... creation,” Cecil explained. “And now it’s released. It’s like a hole I didn’t know I had has been filled.”

The matter of the book, once so great in importance, was settled over a quiet afternoon. “I don’t want it in the house,” Cecil said. Carlos had brought it over from the lab for the first time. It came wrapped in layers of binding cloth inscribed with runes and a few layers of tin foil so it did not make a sound or fill one with a sense of dread with its presence. “I know you might not agree, dear Carlos, but as much as I never want to see it again, I don’t want it to leave Night Vale.” The book was on the coffee table and Cecil was sitting on the couch, his cane resting between his legs. “Carlos, it’ll corrupt you. Isaac, I think you have a better understanding of the harm it can do, yes?”

Isaac nodded. “It’s always been more than the knowledge it offers, but in the wrong hands ...”

“Then I’m trusting it to yours.” Cecil touched the book and slid it in Isaac’s direction. “If you use it _for_ something, or you read too far in ... I’ll know. I know this book a little better than I should.”

Carlos put up no fuss, though he was relieved by the amount of seriousness and reverence Isaac had when he took it into his lap. Maybe Isaac was right – in human hands, nothing good would come of it. Elder knowledge belonged to Elder things.

This left one matter unresolved, and they dealt with it quietly, in a far corner of the Night Vale graveyard, the only place they could be sure had all the right wards to keep the dead in the ground in town. Dean Curwen’s remains – technically, just his skull and some teeth - were buried alongside his ancestors. His drained bloodstones were placed in a small wooden box that held the skull and covered over. Carlos and Isaac poured in dirt until the grave was completely covered, though for union purposes the members of the Night Vale’s gravedigger’s/podiatrist’s union had to be present and paid for their “work.”

The second grave had no headstone, just a nameplate. It read:

Cecil Baldwin 

Years 1993-1999 (approximate) only

 Cecil held the beautiful lacquered box, lined with red velvet, which contained his own former set, also drained of energy and no longer functional. He ran his hand across it before kneeling down and setting it in the small hole. This act wasn’t required; dead bloodstones could be disposed of at a special center at City Hall or he could keep them until his own demise and be buried with them. Cecil was burying more than stones – was putting to rest a part of his life and all that came with it. When he came to his feet with the aid of his cane, he was crying.

 "It called me Father,” he whispered, though that didn’t prevent Carlos, Isaac, or Mayor Winchell (who was also in attendance) from hearing.

Carlos put his arm around Cecil and let his boyfriend rest his head on his shoulder. “I know. I know.” He kissed him on the side of the head. “There’ll be other chances.”

Cecil was slow to react to that one. “...Really?”

Carlos had seen how moved he was by this particular aspect of the night in the house and taken it in slowly. “Maybe, you know, now that there are better circumstances ...” His own voice was barely audible, and that was intentional. “Just not tomorrow, okay? We have other things I’d like to do together first.”

A mischievous look crept across Cecil’s face as Carlos wiped his tears away with his thumb. “Really? What were you thinking of?”

“Let’s leave this place,” Carlos said, “And find out.”

The End


End file.
